Is the Bible Immoral? — Slavery, Violence & Women

Doesn't the Bible endorse slavery?

Scripture regulates slavery rather than abolishing it — rules for buying, owning, even beating slaves — and never simply says “don't own people.” A truly good book would have condemned it outright.

Two honest things. The “slavery” of the Hebrew law was largely debt-servitude — closer to indentured labor, with release in the seventh year for a fellow Israelite — not the race-based chattel slavery of the Atlantic trade. Foreigners could be held for life (Leviticus 25:44–46, the hardest text here), yet against its ancient world the Law cut hard the other way: kidnapping a person to sell him was a capital crime, a slave whose master destroyed an eye or knocked out a tooth went free, and a runaway slave was to be sheltered rather than returned. The New Testament lists “slave-traders” alongside murderers and tells a master to receive his slave “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” Galatians levels the ground completely — and it was evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce who led the parliamentary campaign that abolished Britain’s slave trade in 1807. Scripture doesn't ban it in a single verse; it plants the seed that destroyed the institution.

Doesn't God command genocide — the slaughter of the Canaanites?

God orders Israel to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites, sparing nothing that breathes. That is textbook genocide, divinely commanded.

This one is genuinely hard, and we won't pretend otherwise — but “genocide” misreads it on three counts. The language is ancient war-rhetoric: Joshua reports peoples “utterly destroyed,” then the same books show those peoples very much alive — the totalizing words are formulaic hyperbole, as the texts themselves reveal. It is framed as judgment on specific, deeply corrupt practices, including child sacrifice, after centuries of patience — “the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full” — and pointedly not because Israel was righteous. And mercy was real: Rahab and the Gibeonites turned and were spared. The issue is wickedness and idolatry, not ethnicity.

Isn't the Bible deeply sexist toward women?

The Bible treats women as property, silences them, and is soaked in patriarchy from cover to cover.

It records a patriarchal world — often without endorsing it — yet its own vision runs the other way. Its first chapter says male and female together bear God's image, equal in worth. Jesus, scandalously for his day, taught women, traveled with them, and made them the first witnesses of the resurrection; Paul writes that in Christ “there is neither male nor female.” Peter calls husband and wife “joint heirs of the grace of life.” Measured against the cultures around it, that is a remarkably high view of women. There are hard texts and real debate about roles — but “the book demeans women” collides with the dignity it actually assigns them.

By what standard do we call the Bible “immoral”?

We've simply outgrown the Bible's primitive morality — the modern conscience knows better.

But where did that conscience come from? The very instincts used to indict the Bible — that every human has equal dignity, that the strong must not exploit the weak, that conscience outranks power — are not self-evident, and the classical world largely lacked them. The historian Tom Holland, who once accepted the Enlightenment story that modern values were classical ones rediscovered, found Sparta and Rome more alien the longer he studied them. Christianity’s revolution, he concluded, is “why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value”; in his own morals he was “not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.” To condemn the Bible by those values is, in large part, to judge it by its own children.

historian · Tom Holland (historian of the ancient world), “Why I was wrong about Christianity,” New Statesman, September 14, 2016 (cf. Dominion, 2019)“Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. … It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”

Don't Christians just ignore the Old Testament rules they dislike?

You quote Leviticus on sex but eat shellfish and wear mixed fabrics. That's cherry-picking — keep the rules you like, drop the rest.

The Bible itself draws the distinction; Christians didn't invent it. Israel's ceremonial and civil laws — food, fabric, temple — marked out a particular nation for a season and are explicitly fulfilled and set aside in Christ: Jesus taught that what goes into the stomach cannot defile a person, “making all foods clean,” Hebrews calls the old covenant “obsolete,” while the enduring moral law (love God and neighbor) is reaffirmed, not repealed. It's a coherent covenantal framework, not a pick-and-choose buffet.