This chapter outlines antislavery readings of the Bible during the 1830s and 1840s, highlighting their implications for historical awareness. It shows how words such as context, circumstance, and accommodation seeped into the readings of figures who demonstrated little interest in or awareness of biblical criticism and suggests that even interpretations that did not privilege historical explication sometimes challenged the assumption of a close correspondence between biblical and modern times. The historicizing process began with the most distant periods in question, the Old Testament eras, before encroaching on the period of the New Testament. As debate rested on the New Testament, a number of antislavery readers argued that Christ and his apostles had planted the seeds of slavery’s abolition, a reading that further highlighted historical distance. The argument that the universal principles would find fulfillment in the future drew attention to the distance between the biblical past and the American present. This contention, which retained faith in sacred texts, held great potential to spread awareness of that distance.