Dr Paul Allen

Slavery in the Ancient World Slavery existed in most cultures in the ancient world and in all the cultures surrounding the land of Israel during biblical times. A slave could be owned by the state—such as the publicly owned slaves in Athens who served as a police force—or by individuals. The majority of slaves were prisoners of war who were sold into slavery. Slavery could take the form of debt slavery , in which people sold themselves or their children to clear their debts, punishment for crime, the birth of children to slaves, and the enslavement of victims of piracy or war. Slaves in state-owned mines worked under inhumane conditions and had a short life expectancy. Many household slaves, on the other hand, fared better. In addition to denoting a person’s legal status or identity, the term “slave” also denotes a power relationship between persons. Patterson defines slavery as “social death,” arguing that an enslaved person was “alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of bi...

Butler’s mosaic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the New Testament a. Systems of slavery in  NT times Jewish slavery, to judge by the Talmud, remained governed as always by the tight national unity of the people. There was a sharp distinction between Jewish and Gentile slaves. The former were subject to the sabbath-year manumission , and the onus fell upon Jewish communities everywhere to ransom their nationals held in slavery to Gentiles . Thus no fundamental division into bond and free was recognized. At the same time the whole people might be thought of as the servants of Yahweh. By contrast, Greek slavery was justified in classical theory by the assumption of a natural order of slaves. Since only the citizen class were, strictly speaking, human, slaves were merely chattels. While this idea was carried into practice only in the rare cases where common sense and humanity broke down, the fact remains that throughout classical antiquity the institution of slavery was simply tak...