blical grounds. The descendants of Ham were assumed to be Africans. According to this verse, they were to be slaves forever. Thus the Southern slave owner was only carrying out God's wishes.
             In the Bible it is often unclear whether the Greek word doulos is meant to mean slave or servant. The King James Bible often uses ambiguous terms such as "servant" or "bondsman" while modern, more accurate translations often use "slave". Some scholars believe this was done on purpose to disguise the practice of slavery in the Bible. Because of this, the entire issue of slavery in the Bible has become clouded. While no passage in the Bible clearly condemns slavery, two passages have been used to try to show that the Bible is against it.
             The first is Luke 4:18 which describes Jesus as quoting a passage from Isaiah 61:1-2 which says that "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." The word "captives" is the crucial part of this quote. It is unknown whether it refers to slaves or to prisoners. The second passage is 1 Timothy 1:10. In the OAB it refers to a group of "fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers..." Different versions of the Bible translate the verse differently, with slave traders usually translated as kidnappers or "men-stealers". In the original Greek, the word is "andrapodistes", which combines the words for man and foot. This apparently means to control a person completely. In any case this passage is ambiguous.
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