This volume situates the history of the transatlantic slave trade and American enslavement within a newly framed intellectual landscape, foregrounding the central roles of Mosaic and Islamic legal traditions in shaping moral and political debates over slavery from 1440 to 1830. Against the backdrop of the transformations in the historiography of American slavery—from the racial apologetics of the Dunning School and Lost Cause mythology to the resistance-centric narratives of Du Bois and the modern entanglements of capitalism and race—the study argues that sacred law was never a marginal factor but an instrumental force contested across Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and secular lines. It introduces a comparative framework that connects East African Christian and West African Islamic jurisprudence to early Jewish and Christian Transatlantic and American legal-theological debates revealing how Jewish, Christian, Muslim and secular actors strategically appropriated texts from both the Mosaic and Islamic legal traditions to justify, regulate, or condemn human bondage.