“Moses legalized domestic slavery for God’s chosen people, in the very act of setting them aside to holiness.
R L Dabney
Life of Lt Gen Thomas J Jackson
But if we are going to toss Dabney on the bonfire of our cultural vanities we need to be willing to throw Calvin there as well;
“That since God permitted the fathers to retain servants and maids, it is a thing lawful; and further, as God permitted the Jews also, under the Law, to bear rule over aliens, and to keep them perpetually as servants, it follows that this cannot be disapproved.”
“If, then, servitude were unlawful, the Apostles would have never tolerated it; but they would have boldly denounced such a profane practice had it been so.”
“We hence see that the thing in itself is not unlawful.”
It is criminal for publishing houses to just delete whole sections of author’s works because they don’t find them tasteful to their zeitgeist palates.
It would seem to be an acceptable Biblical possibility to affirm the right to slavery theoretically, in abstract (thus affirming the truth of Original Sin, or that some members of fallen mankind can deserve to be slaves) – and then to regulate it to death, or least close to death, making it a marginal institution, by way of turning slave-owning into such demanding business that evil, worldly people would not be attracted to such a hard job. This is what conservative 17th century Dutch theologians apparently did, at least on paper:
http://users.telenet.be/fvde/Works4c.htm
“(52) In the words of a recent scholar, “the preparedness of Mercado or Albornoz to attack the slave trade, or of Sandoval and Claver to minister to the arriving slaves, has something admirable about it, even if they never attacked slavery root and branch”. Indeed, most of the arguments revolved around legal restrictions and traditional religious morals, but in defence of these authors it must be said that if some of their advocated restrictions had actually been applied, this would have resulted in a de facto end of slavery. R. Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 155.
The same is true for works by preachers such as Cornelis Poudroyen (? – 1662) and Georgius de Raad (c. 1625-1677), which can be situated in the strict form of Calvinism endorsed by the theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676).53 De Raad even wrote a whole book on the topic, Bedenckingen over den Guineeschen Slaef-handel, but however critical this work was about slavery and although a strict application of its morals would have made it very hard to buy or sell slaves, it in a way did accept the system of slavery, as its basic tenet was that the act of buying slaves created a duty for any Reformed Christian “to take care” that these slaves “were not sold to Idolaters, attaching a blame to the true Religion.”54″
In ancient Israel, slavery was indeed permitted but thanks to Mosaic restrictions, it never became such a massive institution as chattel-slavery among pagan Greeks and Romans (that often displaced free labour altogether); the Leftist historian Will Durant observed about Palestine in the days of Christ (in whose parables we are shown vineyard WORKERS, that is hired labourers, not slaves):
https://erenow.org/ancient/durantromecaesar/169.php
“Slaves were fewer than in any other Mediterranean country. Petty trade flourished, but there were as yet few Jewish merchants of large means and range. “We are not a commercial people,” said Josephus; “we live in a country [eastern Judea] without a seaboard, and have no inclination to [foreign] trade.”22 Financial operations were of minor scope until Hillel, perhaps at Herod’s suggestion, abrogated the law of Deuteronomy (xv, 1-11) requiring the cancellation of debts every seventh year.”
In other words, only after Talmudic rabbis had, with their slippery ways, sufficiently “loosened up” Mosaic regulations did the Jews become successful big-time businessmen – and slave-traders.