H1: How Israel Handled Fugitive Slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15)
I remember reading about the Underground Railroad in school. Most of you probably do, too. But for those that don’t, it was an interconnected series of friendly pit stops where a runaway slave from the American South could find their way to freedom in the North. Abolitionists manned these stops and provided resources to these slaves.
As you can imagine, slaveholders in the South hated Deuteronomy 23:15-16 because it does not provide for the extradition of slaves back to their masters. Instead, as the Text allows, those slaves are free to live “where it pleases him.”
I understand we’re not under the Old Law anymore, and the people in those days did too. But what’s at stake here is a principle: The land of Israel was to be a sanctuary where people could be free, not held in bondage for their entire lives. Even those who entered into it voluntarily were free at the Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25).
Pro-slavery advocates in the South usually didn’t argue that this verse didn’t apply because it was under the Old Law, however (they used other passages in the Old Testament to support slavery, after all). But what they did argue for was that these verses only provided asylum for foreign slaves, not those who were native to Israel.
That’s a tradition that dates back to Old Testament days, too. The phrase “live with you in your midst” implies that they originally came from somewhere outside your midst.
But I have a hard time believing it only applied to foreign runaway slaves. There is no mention of a similar law for native Israelites; this one in Deuteronomy 23 reads to me like an umbrella clause for all slaves—both native and foreign.
Of course, if you are of the mindset that slaves were property, as so many slaveholders were a few hundred years ago, then passages like Deuteronomy 22:1-3 and Leviticus 6:2-5 come into the picture. It was considered your “neighborly duty” to return property back to its original owner, including, according to some, human beings.
I don’t take that stance, and I don’t believe that’s how God intended these laws to be interpreted either. Instead, what He wanted was Israel to be a place of sanctuary and peace for anyone who drew unto Him. Even slaves.