The ethical energy of the Bible is rarely unleashed on a corrupt world to accomplish its transforming work in quick, redemptive violence. It is, rather, like a benignly corrosive agent leaked into the streams and water tables of an unsuspecting nation.
Slavery, for example, continues as a recognized—one might almost say authorized—institution in both of the biblical testaments. Yet its ugliest manifestations are one by one orphaned, excluded, and in the end quietly denounced by the mere act of recognizing the human dignity of slaves.
In the Pentateuch this positive anthropology is complemented by an historical recollection: ‘You too were slaves in Egypt.’
Israel is enjoined to nurture the memory of what it was like to have one’s human dignity resolutely dismissed by the rigors of forced labor in Egypt. History, in this way, becomes ethics. Memory is the hinge between the two things.
If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. And when you send a male slave out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the LORD your God has blessed you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; for this reason I lay this command upon you today.
A people that affirms that dignity is a function of humanity rather than of the tribe is halfway to freedom. When one adds to this the memory of slaves, any institution that depends upon the classification of human beings into greater and lesser by dint of birth begins to look doomed.
One is often encouraged to forget the past, to fix one’s eyes on a future destination, to lean into freedom, liberation, and the glories of serving one’s Creator. Yet there is still a place for the memory of servitude.
Canter Bridge 
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