Leviticus 25:39-44

That is all I really want there. Just to give you a little bit of a taste of the way God regulated slavery at the time.

Like I said, this gives you a kind of a taste of how God wanted to regulate this institution within the nation of Israel. So, an Israelite slave had to be treated as a hired servant and he could leave a free man after his time of service. No slave, whatever the case, could be made to serve more than 49 years. Until the next Jubilee, when all were to be set free, all were to be given liberty. Moreover, when an Israelite slave was freed, his master had to give him animals and grain and wine liberally— load him down with these things so that he could get a fresh start. But the institution itself was not abolished. He worked within it.

Leviticus 25:44-46

By and large, the economy of the ancient Near East was never one substantially based on slave labor—as in classical and later Greece, or above all in Imperial Rome. The Old Testament does not regard the possession of slaves to be always, and under all circumstances, a moral evil. Israelites were permitted to impose the punishment of slavery upon heathen nations.

So God bans slavery between Israelites. Human nature's tendency, combined with Satan's influence to be cruel, makes it very necessary for God to include in Scripture every possible emphasis to oppose cruelty against slaves. Let us briefly look at some of the commands regarding the treatment of slaves. I have listed nine here. There may be others, but these are the nine main ones.

Leviticus 25:41-48

Now notice, this is instructions about an Israelite who gets into debt and makes himself a slave in order to get out of that debt. It is slightly different from the one that is there in Exodus 21. So the instructions here are a little different.

So slaves of a foreign country were treated differently from slaves that were Israelites, but it is still highly regulated here compared to the way it was in other nations.