Paul begins his letter to the Romans by introducing himself in three words of Greek: Παῦλος δοῦλος, “Paul, a doulos.” The King James Version made that “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ.” Some modern translations say “slave,” some say “bondservant,” and many still say “servant,” often with a footnote.
The difference is not small. A servant, to a modern English reader, is someone employed: a butler, a maid, a civil servant. A slave is a person owned by another. The Greek word means the second. Yet “slave” brings to mind the Atlantic slave trade and the plantations of the Americas, which are not exactly what Paul knew either. And the same word, in Hebrew as well as Greek, is also one of the Bible’s highest titles of honor: “the servant of the LORD.”
No single English word does everything the original does. This article explains why, and how Open Word Bible handles it.
What the words mean
The Greek δοῦλος (doulos) is the ordinary word for a slave. Its meaning is not in doubt. The meaning decision for Romans 1:1 puts it plainly: “a slave, a person owned by another.” Greek had other words for those who served without being owned: a diakonos waited on others, a misthios was a hired worker, and a hypēretēs was an assistant or officer.
The Hebrew עֶ֣בֶד (ʿeved) is broader. It comes from the verb “to work” or “to serve,” and it covers a wide range: a slave bought with money, a debtor working off what he owed, a king’s minister, a vassal king, and a worshipper before God. Courtiers are the king’s ʿavadim. People call themselves “your servant” when speaking politely to a superior. In many of these uses, “slave” would be wrong. In others, “servant” hides what was happening.
Slavery in Israel
The Old Testament law does not abolish slavery, but it limits and regulates it, and it treats some kinds very differently from others.
An Israelite who fell into debt could sell himself, or be sold, to work it off. His service was limited. Exodus 21:2 begins the laws on slaves with exactly this case:
When you acquire a Hebrew slave, he will serve six years; then in the seventh year he is to be released, free and owing nothing.
The meaning decision for this verse is careful. It calls him “a fellow Hebrew in debt servitude, limited to six years,” and says that this “is not the chattel slavery” of verses 20–21, where a slave is called the owner’s “money” and bound for life. Leviticus 25 goes further. An Israelite who sells himself is not to be made to do “a slave’s work” but treated as a hired worker, and he goes free at the Jubilee (25:39–40). The reason is theological: “they are my slaves, since I brought them out of the land of Egypt. They must not be sold the way slaves are sold” (25:42).
The same chapter allows Israelites to buy slaves from the nations around them and keep them permanently, as property that could be passed on to children (25:44–46). The law also protected slaves in some ways. A slave who lost an eye or a tooth to his master went free (Exodus 21:26–27), and an escaped slave was not to be handed back (Deuteronomy 23:15–16). These laws were humane by the standards of their world. They still assume that one person could own another.
Over all of it stands the exodus. Israel had been slaves in Egypt, and God brought them out of “the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). The law repeatedly tells Israel to remember, when it deals with slaves and strangers, that they too were once slaves in Egypt (Deuteronomy 15:15; 24:18).
Slavery in the Roman world
The slavery of Paul’s world was different again. Slaves were a large part of the population, especially in cities; historians’ estimates vary, but in places like Corinth and Ephesus they were a very visible share. People became slaves by capture in war, by birth to a slave mother, by being abandoned as infants, by debt, or by selling themselves. Slavery was not based on race.
Slaves did every kind of work, from mines and fields to managing estates and teaching children. A trusted slave might handle large sums of his master’s money, as in Jesus’s parables of the talents and the minas. Many urban slaves could hope to be freed in their twenties or thirties, and a freed slave then owed his former owner loyalty as a patron. But under the law a slave was property. He could be beaten, sold, separated from family and used sexually, and he had no legal right to refuse.
“Servant of the LORD”
A slave’s standing depended on whose slave he was. That explains the most important religious use of the word. In the Old Testament, to be God’s ʿeved was a title of honor. Moses is “the servant of the LORD” at his death (Deuteronomy 34:5), and so is Joshua at his (Joshua 24:29). God calls David “my servant.” The prophets are “my servants the prophets.”
In Isaiah 40–55 the title becomes the centre of a series of poems about “my servant,” whom God upholds and through whom justice comes to the nations (Isaiah 42:1), who is despised and suffers for the sins of others, and who is in the end “high and lifted up” (52:13). The Greek translators of Isaiah usually rendered the servant here not with doulos but with pais, a word that can mean “child” as well as “servant,” and Matthew follows them when he quotes Isaiah 42 of Jesus (Matthew 12:18).
To be God’s slave, in this language, was to belong wholly to the greatest master there is. It meant dependence and obedience, but also honor, trust and protection. That is why it is so hard to translate. “Slave of the LORD” sounds degrading in English. “Servant of the LORD” sounds like an employee. Neither carries both halves at once.
Paul’s self-description
When Paul calls himself a doulos of Christ Jesus (Romans 1:1; Philippians 1:1; Galatians 1:10), he draws on both worlds. He uses the Roman word for a person owned by another, and he echoes the Old Testament title of Moses and the prophets. The meaning decision for Romans 1:1 says both: Paul “belongs to him entirely and acts at his command,” and the word “recalls the Old Testament title ‘servant of the LORD’ given to Moses, David and the prophets, so it is a title of honor as well as of belonging.”
Paul pushes the language hardest in Philippians 2:7, where Christ, who was “in the form of God,” emptied himself and took “the form of a slave.” The meaning decision there notes that the word “stands opposite ‘form of God’ here and opposite ‘Lord’ in verse 11,” and adds that Rome used crucifixion for slaves: “the slave’s form of verse 7 ends in a slave’s death.”
How English Bibles have handled it
Early English Bibles mostly said “servant.” Tyndale, the Geneva Bible and the King James Version used it for doulos in nearly every place. In 1611 a “servant” could include people who were bound to a master and not free to leave, so the word was closer to the Greek than it is now. Where slave and free were set side by side, the King James Version often said “bond”: “there is neither bond nor free” (Galatians 3:28).
Many modern translations still say “servant,” usually with a footnote “or slave.” Others have tried “bondservant” or “bond-servant,” as the New American Standard Bible does in many places. The word signals that something more than employment is meant, but it is not a word most English speakers use, and it can soften the reality it names. A number of scholars have argued for “slave” throughout, among them Murray J. Harris in Slave of Christ (1999). The Holman Christian Standard Bible and the Legacy Standard Bible use “slave” much more often than older versions.
Each choice has a cost. “Servant” is familiar and keeps the honor of “servant of the LORD,” but it hides the fact of ownership and makes Paul’s language about being bought and freed hard to follow. “Slave” is accurate but brings to mind race-based chattel slavery. “Bondservant” sits in between and is clear to few.
The moral weight
This is not only a matter of accuracy. For centuries, Bible verses about slaves were used to defend slavery. Defenders of slavery in the American South quoted “Slaves, obey your earthly masters” (Ephesians 6:5) and the curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:25). An abridged Bible published in London in 1807 for enslaved people in the British West Indies left out most of the exodus story. Enslaved Christians, for their part, heard in the same Bible the story of God bringing slaves out of Egypt, and abolitionists appealed to Paul’s words that in Christ “there is neither slave nor free.”
A translation cannot undo that history, and should not try to hide it. Our record for Genesis 9:25 addresses it directly: the verse “was wrongly used to justify the enslavement of Africans, under the false idea of a ‘curse of Ham,’” but the text curses Canaan only and “says nothing about skin color or race.” Translating “slave” as “servant” in a passage like Ephesians 6 would make it sound like advice to employees, and would quietly remove what the text actually says. Translating “slave” everywhere would make the honor of God’s servants sound like degradation. Both kinds of distortion have consequences.
What Open Word Bible does
Open Word Bible handles this as it handles other difficult words: one meaning decision, and wording that varies by level. Its English style guide sets the default.
The meaning is always stated. Every sentence with doulos or ʿeved has a meaning decision that says what the person’s position was: owned, not hired. That decision holds at every level and in every language.
Literal says “slave.” A reader who wants to see the hard edge of the word sees it: “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus” (Romans 1:1); “Moses the slave of the LORD” (Joshua 1:1); “the form of a slave” (Philippians 2:7).
Balanced and Readable usually say “servant.” The rendering decisions repeat the reason: the meaning decision keeps “that the person was owned,” while the two plainer levels avoid “the picture of modern chattel slavery that ‘slave’ brings to most readers.” So Romans 1:1 at Balanced reads “a servant of Christ Jesus,” and Mary at Balanced says “I am the Lord’s servant.” Readable explains her words instead: “I belong to the Lord, and I am ready to do what he wants.”
”Slave” stays at every level where slavery itself is the point. The style guide lists the cases: where slave is set against free or freed; where people are bought, sold, owned or released; Israel’s slavery in Egypt; slavery to sin set against freedom; and sayings where “slave” is set against “servant” as a step down. Each such sentence carries a rendering decision saying why. Exodus 21:2 and Leviticus 25:39–42 say “slave” at every level, because the laws are about buying, selling and release. Galatians 3:28 says “no slave or free person.” In Mark 10:43–44, Jesus says that whoever wants to be great must be “your servant,” and whoever wants to be first must be “slave of all.” Here two different Greek words stand side by side, and the rendering decision explains that “the step down from servant to slave is the point.”
Ephesians 6 keeps “slaves.” The record says Paul “speaks to slaves as a social class, people actually owned,” and that “servant” would change the meaning. Its meaning decision adds that the letter “does not discuss whether slavery should exist; it speaks to people inside it and puts slaves and masters under one Lord.”
Philemon
The short letter to Philemon is the sharpest test. Onesimus was a slave in Philemon’s household. He had come to Paul, and through Paul had become a believer. The traditional view is that he had run away; some scholars think instead that he had come to Paul to ask for help in a dispute with his master. Paul sends him back with this letter, and in verse 16 describes him as οὐκέτι ὡς δοῦλον ἀλλὰ ὑπὲρ δοῦλον, ἀδελφὸν ἀγαπητόν:
Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a little while: so that you might have him back for good, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a dear brother. He is especially dear to me, and how much more to you, both in everyday life and in the Lord.
The rendering decision keeps “slave” at every level here, because the verse sets Onesimus’s status as one owned against his new place as a brother. “No longer as a servant” would lose the whole point.
What Paul is asking for is debated. The meaning decision is marked uncertain, and a footnote gives the other view. It takes “no longer as a slave” to mean that Philemon is to receive and treat Onesimus as a brother, and notes that “whether Paul asks for his legal freedom is not said.” Verse 21, “you will do even more than I say,” may hint at freedom, or at Onesimus returning to help Paul. The record leaves that open, as the letter does.
1 Corinthians 7
Paul’s advice to slaves in Corinth raises a famous problem of grammar. Our Literal level gives 1 Corinthians 7:21 like this:
Were you called [as a] slave? Let it not concern you; but if indeed you are able to become free, rather make use [of it].
The last words in Greek are only “rather use,” with no object, which is why Literal brackets “of it.” Use what? Freedom, or the present state of slavery?
Open Word Bible takes them as “take the opportunity to become free,” and Balanced says “make the most of it,” but the decision is marked uncertain, and its footnote says plainly that “both readings have long been held, and the evidence is evenly balanced.” The next verse turns both statuses around:
For a slave who has been called in the Lord is the Lord’s freed slave; and in the same way, someone free who has been called is a slave of Christ.
Where the drafts are not yet consistent
Applying a rule like this across a whole Bible takes judgement, and the drafts do not yet apply it everywhere in the same way. In Isaiah, the book’s term list gives “servant” for the servant of the LORD even at the Literal level, so Isaiah 42:1 and 52:13 say “my servant” at every level, while Joshua 1:1 says “Moses the slave of the LORD” at Literal. Both choices can be defended. A reviewer will need to decide whether the title should read the same in both books. The drafts are AI-assisted, and none has yet been reviewed.
See also Word for word or meaning for meaning? and Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning.
Open Philemon, Romans 1 or 1 Corinthians 7 to see the records.