Slavery, Ancient and Modern
Part One
Read Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
Slavery is making the rounds again.
To be more specific, the question of what we should do with American theological heroes who supported human enslavement has been making the rounds again. This month, John Piper penned a piece seeking an answer for Jonathan Edwards’s slaveholding, despite his theological depth. Last year, Tom Nettles wrote a lengthy article defending the legacy of slaveholding Southern Baptists who nevertheless made significant theological contributions.
Despite the fact that the United States is 156 years removed from the passage of the 13th Amendment, it remains a tricky problematic for us. On the one hand, just about everyone agrees human enslavement is bad, contrary to the ethic of Scripture, and is rightfully outlawed. On the other, some Christians we really like were just fine with it.
On top of all of this, “the Bible promotes slavery” remains a popular critique of Christianity. Last year, an agnostic friend of mine challenged me when I suggested that slavery was unbiblical. After all, it has a lot to say about slaves needing to submit to masters—much less to say about the abolition of slavery as a form of righteousness.
On this the theological (and social) conservatives and anti-theists appear to agree: the Bible is fuzzy on human enslavement, so it’s understandable that Christians supported slavery when it was legal and in vogue.
In this series, I will argue that both are wrong. They are wrong because Scripture develops what I will call a “trajectory of abolition.” There is, embedded in the canonical arc of Scripture, a trajectory which bends toward abolition, despite not explicitly articulating this demand outright. In other words, the Bible demands that human enslavement should have no place among Christians.
I will develop this argument argument in four steps. First, I will define terms in the remainder of this post. Second, I will explore the institution of slavery in the old covenant. Third, I will explore the dynamics of slavery in the new covenant. Finally, I will draw my argument to a conclusion.
Defining Slavery
It has been common, in these discussions, to engage in semantic confusion, by assuming that Ancient Near Eastern slavery = Greco-Roman slavery = Antebellum slavery. This is historically inaccurate, and muddles the conversation. But why?
Slavery in the Ancient Near East (ANE)
Slavery, as an institution, existed as a de facto reality throughout the Ancient Near East. Haas notes that, in general, “all subjects of the user, including his important officials, were considered his slaves or servants.”¹ It is generally recognized that there were two forms of enslavement in the ancient Near East: chattel slavery (typically consisting of foreigners conquered through war, or purchased in slave trades), and debt-slavery.² A third, temporary form was also present in the corvée (a mandated work party typically consisting of citizens).
The forms and nature of slavery in the ANE are a little murky, as most records are transactional, rather than biographical. But it does seem to be clear that slaves held various roles, with varying degree of freedom and responsibilities, depending on the particular societal structures in which it existed. Chirichigno notes that ancient Mesopotamian society (which would have had significance as an culture adjacent to Israel) was highly stratified, consisting of three social classes: free citizens (nobility, officials, merchants, etc.), semi-free citizens (those who worked for the state and temples) and unfree chattel-slaves. He makes the interesting observation that free citizens possessed a degree of insecurity, as they could migrate down strata if they defaulted on loans and were forced to become debt-slaves to repay creditors.³ But a clear distinction was made in the ANE between chattel-slaves and debt-slaves; the one could be redeemed; the other could not.⁴ Not only did adults sell themselves into slavery, but children were apparently sold as well, sometimes as a permanent transfer for cash, other times related to a form of adoption.⁵ While slaves in the ANE were considered property, Mendelsohn points out that “both law and society were forced to take into consideration constantly self-asserting humanity of the slave.”⁶ For a broad review of ANE slavery, see Snell’s treatment.⁷
Slavery in the Greco-Roman
When we move into the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament, we discover that slavery has evolved and been codified into Roman law. Rupprecht estimates that “85–90 percent of the inhabitants of Rome and the peninsula Italy were slaves or of slave origin in the first and second centuries A.D.”⁹ He also notes that debt-slavery was less common by the late Roman Empire, with the bulk of slaves being prisoners of war. Glancy notes the humble and generally degrading existence of slaves in the Roman world,¹⁰ observing as well the prevalence of kidnapping as a supply for the slave trade — a practiced condemned by Christian authors, as well as pagan ones.¹¹ As common as slavery was, there were diverse experiences of it, and diverse views of the ethics of various means of acquiring slaves.
American Antebellum Slavery
Slavery was not done away with in the post-Constantine Western world, although it was certainly diminished¹² and altered in form. By the late medieval, renaissance and into the Enlightenment eras, new and novel justifications for slavery were emerging, rooted in systems of human hierarchies based on so-called racial distinctions.¹³
This was a critical development for Western slavery. While ANE and Roman slavery certainly relied upon supply of foreigners through conquest, the Western slave trade trafficked large numbers of human cargo from the African continent. This trade was justified through carefully articulated bodies of thought that viewed black bodies as inherently inferior, or even sub-human, and therefore worthy to be trafficked and enslaved. Africans were not the only people forced into slavery, but they became a primary target by those motivated by racialized justifications. And this is of particular interest for our discussion, as the American experiment trafficked in ~388,000 Africans through the Middle Passage.¹⁴
Slavery, Ancient and Modern
So how does Western chattel slavery relate to more ancient forms?
First, it is clear that slaves throughout the ancient world were viewed as property, and could not be classified as free and independent. In this way, there are similarities.
Second, however, the basis on which slaves were made and kept differed. While there was no doubt forced enslavement in the ancient world (through conquest, for example), and while one might find examples of ethnic-differentiation between slave and free in the ANE or Roman Empire, you were just as likely to find citizens of the home state enslaved, due to debts, as criminals, etc. If anything, slavery appears to be tied to ethnicity only insofar as ethnicity is tied to political or economic power.
Western institutions of enslavement were unique in that they employed categories of whiteness to justify the enslavement of those who were racially “other.” In other words, it had less to do with political power or class, and more to do with external biological features reasoned to be indicators of sub-humanity. Therefore, we see a transformation in the eligibility of slave material — really, an intensification of otherness — that casts a wider net untethered to culture or nation per se.
Finally, while it is true that neither enslaved peoples in ancient eras nor modern eras received equal protection or rights enjoyed by those who were free, it is also clear that ancient legislation provided structure and varying forms of protections for enslaved peoples. Western slavery, frequently intensified the humiliations of slavery in grotesque ways.
In the next post, I will survey the Old Testament landscape on slavery and demonstrate key distinctions that set the institutions apart from the surrounding culture.
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NOTES
¹ “Slave, Slavery” in Alexander, T. Desmond, and David W. Baker, eds. Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2003. 779.
² For an interesting treatment of debt-slavery in the ancient world, with a particular focus on unpacking the OT laws on slavery, see Chirichigno, Gregory C.. Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient near East, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2009.
³ Chirichigno, 49–50.
⁴ Chirichigno, 53.
⁵ See Mendelsohn, I. “Slavery in the Ancient Near East.” The Biblical Archaeologist 9, no. 4 (1946): 76.
⁶ Mendelsohn, 82.
⁷ Snell, D. (2011). Slavery in the ancient Near East. In K. Bradley & P. Cartledge (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery (The Cambridge World History of Slavery, pp. 4–21).
⁸ Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Accordance electronic ed., version 4.5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. s.v. עֶבֶד
⁹ Rupprecht, A.A., “Slave, Slavery” in Hawthorne, Gerald, ed. Dictionary of Paul and His Letters: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. Downers Grove Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993.
¹⁰ Glancy, J. (2011). Slavery and the rise of Christianity. In K. Bradley & P. Cartledge (Eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery (The Cambridge World History of Slavery, pp. 456–481).
¹¹ Glancy, Slavery and the Rise of Christianity, 464.
¹² See Glancy’s interesting and inconclusive discussion of church fathers’ views of slavery, whether for preservation, modification or abolition of slavery.
¹³ For a robust discussion of the ideas permeating these justifications, see Kendi, Ibram X., Stamped from the Beginning, (Nation Books, 2016), 1–91; J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
