“Thus Judah was carried away captive out of his own land,” Jeremiah 52:27.
Once an interesting, fresh phrase, “Human Trafficking” has been talked about so much in the last twenty years it may be in danger of becoming a cliché. But don’t tune out. The Bible has a great deal to say about what we now refer to as “human trafficking.”
In the year 2000, the United States passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Numerous updates and related laws have been enacted since. The government takes seriously those who would assert ownership or control over other humans, whether through sexual trafficking, labor trafficking, “involuntary servitude,” debt bondage, or the victimization of youth in the foster care system[1].
When traffic is used as a verb, the simplest definition may be engage, deal, or trade. Humans have been dealing in other humans for centuries. We have been capturing, owning, and trading each other throughout all of human history. Consequently, human trafficking plays a large part in the Biblical narrative.
In Genesis 37:26-28, Joseph’s brothers ‘trafficked’ him to slave traders. Later the descendants of Joseph and his brothers became slaves in Egypt, and their rescue from slavery will forever be history’s greatest rescue of victims of human trafficking.
After Israel settled in the Promised Land, four tribes were taken captive and trafficked to Assyria in 734 B.C. Then in 597 B.C., Judah was taken captive and trafficked to Babylon.
These are generations of people being ripped from their homeland, taken to a new home a thousand miles away, forced to learn a new language, new culture, new diet, you name it. For modern Bible readers, the hardest part of the story might be the struggle to maintain some sense of the timeline. But for those who lived it, this was the most difficult experience of their lives!
Imagine if warriors from another nation who do not speak your language, suddenly showed up in your town, rounded everyone into railroad cars, and then ships, and then set sail for a new home on another continent. And you will never, ever return. That is human trafficking. That is bondage and exile. That is what Daniel suffered when he was taken to Babylon.
But it is also the sort of experience people have in our world every day. Sociologists might describe many of these experiences as “voluntary,” but how voluntary is it, when Rwanda is on fire and the only choice a mother has is to take her children and run to Tanzania? And following the murder of their parents, how many young men “voluntarily” walk from Sudan to Egypt, to eventually be resettled by the United Nations in Fargo, North Dakota?
Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, some 800,000 Vietnamese refugees braved the Pacific Ocean in small, overcrowded boats, desperate to reach Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, many eventually immigrating to the United States, Canada, and Australia. Not every refugee or fugitive is trafficked. But the number of unwillingly displaced persons is well into the millions.
–And the Bible speaks to that. The Bible is a book for the broken, the hurting, the displaced, the downtrodden. Most Americans are blessed to have had no experience with words like exile, fugitive, refugee, or victim. But around the world, huge numbers have experienced so much loss in war-torn nations, or nations led by greedy dictators who make bad decision-after-bad-decision, resulting in joblessness, bankruptcy, famine, and revolution. These tragedies are the norm for so much of the world and so much of human history. We in the United States have no idea how fortunate, how blessed we are.
But perhaps in our peaceful life in a land of milk and honey, we suffer a unique loss.
Unless we pay attention to the struggles going on around the world, we will never understand the Bible the way some of these trafficking victims might. Victims of human trafficking and refugees forced to leave their homeland will understand the Bible with insight we will never have, or at least not until we educate ourselves deeply about their lives. After all, a great deal of the Bible concerns human trafficking, slavery, fugitives on the run, and those living in exile in lands not their own. On top of that, there are the many years in which Israel had no autonomy or self-rule and instead had to live under the thumb of occupying forces, whether Persia, Greece, or Rome.
These are conditions Americans cannot conceive.
Consider how many books of the Bible focus on such displaced or oppressed persons:
BOOKS ABOUT SLAVERY AND DELIVERANCE FROM SLAVERY: Genesis and Exodus.
BOOKS ABOUT LIVING AS A NOMAD/FUGITIVE WITH NO HOME: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
BOOKS ABOUT EXILE: Daniel, Esther, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and portions of Isaiah.
BOOKS ABOUT THE RETURN FROM EXILE: Ezra and Nehemiah.
BOOKS ABOUT LIVING IN A LAND OCCUPIED BY A FOREIGN POWER WHETHER PERSIAN, GREEK, OR ROMAN: Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations, Joel, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. (And honestly, the entire New Testament concerns nations under Roman occupation.)
That is some 24* books of the Bible set against a context of either slavery and human trafficking, refugees and fugitives, or living under the control of an occupying foreign power. Americans have enjoyed peaceful self-rule for almost 250 years. (And England has enjoyed a relatively stable government for 1,200 years!) But these are the exceedingly rare exceptions in human history.
Human civilization is a constant clash of wars and upsets and natural disasters like fire, famine, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Suffering defines most lives the way oceans define national borders. And the Bible is written for the suffering.
The Bible is written for the victims of human trafficking.
The words of the great poem inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty could be spoken by the Bible rather than by Lady Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”[2]
Dear God, fill us with compassion for the trafficked, the impoverished, the refugees, the fugitives. May we offer them relief and comfort and a homeland. And may we learn from their suffering to understand your scripture more deeply. Fill us with compassion for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of teeming shores, the homeless, and the tempest-tossed. Give us wisdom to address the difficult challenges of immigration and asylum. May we be like the men of Issachar who “understood the times and knew what Israel should do,” 1 Chronicles 12:32.
AΩ.
[1] https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/human-trafficking/federal-law
[2] “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus.
*The number is higher than 24. Most of the Bible is a narrative of God’s dealings with a nation without autonomy (as a nation) and without liberty (for individuals). In Genesis, the people have liberty, but are not yet a nation. In Exodus, they become a nation but are under Egypt’s control. Once freed, they have autonomy and liberty in theory, but no homeland–and are thus wandering nomads (fugitives) for forty years. The books of Genesis, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Hosea, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, and Habakkuk report the records of a free nation living under the rule of its own kings–and even then, many of those kings were wicked men and oppressors. The entire New Testament chronicles life under Roman rule. By this count, only 19 books of the Bible report the activities of a free people living in a nation with self-rule. To put it another way:
Nineteen books of the Bible report the history of free people living under autonomous self-rule (and many of those rulers were evil oppressors). The remaining 47 books concern people in slavery, in exile, or suffering under the occupying armies of Persia, Greece, or Rome. This is a book about the oppressed, the trafficked, the exploited, the owned.
The Bible is largely a book about people suffering under various kinds of oppression, exile, slavery, trafficking, or the jackbooted thuggery of occupying armies.
Liberty in Christ would have been the first taste of meaningful liberty a Christian experienced.
Household Words: 