The Bible and slavery
[7] Masters were usually men, but the Bible portrays upper-class women from Sarah to Esther and Judith with their enslaved maids,[8][9][10] as do the Elephantine papyri in the 400s BC.
They also catered to the needs of the temple and they performed more domestic tasks such as keeping up the household, raising farm animals and growing small amounts of crops.
[14] If the soldier desired to marry a captured foreigner, he was required to take her to his house, shave her head, pare her nails,[a] and discard her captive's garb.
[15] Harold C. Washington cites Deuteronomy 21:10–14 as an example of how the Bible condones acts of sexual violence which are committed by Israelites; they were taking advantage of women who, as war captives, had no recourse or means of self defense.
[16] M. I. Rey argues that the passage is an endorsement of sexual slavery and genocidal rape, because the capture of these women is justified on the ground that they are not Hebrew.
[17] According to many Jewish commentators, the laws which regulate the treatment of female captives are not intended to encourage the capture and forced marriage of women, instead, they view it as inevitable in wartime and they also seek to minimize the occurrence and brutality of it.
The authorities intervened first and foremost to protect the former category of each--citizens who had fallen on hard times and had been forced into slavery by debt or famine.
In the Ancient Near East, wives and (non-adult) children were dependents of the head of household and were sometimes sold into slavery by the husband or father for financial reasons.
Evidence of this viewpoint is found in the Code of Hammurabi, which permits debtors to sell their wives and children into temporary slavery, lasting a maximum of three years.
Biblical authors repeatedly criticize debt slavery, which could be attributed to high taxation, monopoly of resources, high-interest loans, and collapse of higher kinship groups.
[32][33] An Israelite father could sell his unmarried daughters into servitude, with the expectation or understanding that the master or his son could eventually marry her (as in Exodus 21:7–11.)
It is understood by Jewish and Christian commentators that this referred to the sale of a daughter, who "is not arrived to the age of twelve years and a day, and this through poverty.
[36] The code states that failure to comply with these regulations would automatically grant free manumission to the enslaved woman,[37] while all Israelite slaves were to be treated as hired servants.
[51] Some believe that the non-Israelites refer to neighboring Gentile nations, except for Canaanites who were doomed to destruction,[52][53] foreigners who refused to join Israel (Isaiah 60:1–6)[54] and unbelievers since Israelites were "children of Abraham by faith".
[27][64] The earlier[27][28][29] Covenant Code provides a potentially more valuable and direct form of relief, namely a degree of protection for the slave's person (their body and its health) itself.
Leviticus does not mention seventh-year manumission; instead it only instructs that debt-slaves, and Israelite slaves owned by foreign residents, should be freed during the national Jubilee[3] (occurring either every 49 or every 50 years, depending on interpretation).
[47] While many commentators see the Holiness Code regulations as supplementing the prior legislation mandating manumission in the seventh year,[81][82][83] the otherwise potentially long wait until the Jubilee was somewhat alleviated by the Holiness Code, with the instruction that slaves should be allowed to buy their freedom by paying an amount equal to the total wages of a hired servant over the entire period remaining until the next Jubilee (this could be up to 49 years-worth of wages).
"[104] In 1 Timothy 1:10, Paul condemns the sexually immoral, abusers of themselves with mankind, liars, perjurers, those that kidnap innocents and sell them into slavery,[105] and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.
Manumission within the Roman system largely depends on the mode of enslavement: slaves were often foreigners, prisoners of war, or those heavily indebted.
Children were often offered to creditors as a form of payment and their manumission was determined ab initio (at the outset) with the pater (family head).
Being sold into sexual slavery meant greater chance of perpetual servitude, by way of explicit enslavement or forced marriage.
[110] Paul's treatment of Onesimus additionally brings into question of Roman slavery as a "closed" or "open" slave system.
[110] Roman slavery exhibited characteristics of both, open and closed, systems which further complicates the letter from Paul to Philemon regarding the slave Onesimus.
Revelation 18 lists enslaved people as one of the "excessive luxuries" of "Babylon the Great" which it says will fall when God judges its "sins" and "crimes".
[112] Translations of the Bible intended for popular and liturgical use, rather than specifically for scholarly use, have to contend with readers not knowing the details of ancient slavery and its points of differences with the modern harshly negative implications of the term 'slave'.
The Hebrew term `ebed is usually used for slave or bondsman (fellow Jews controlled for a period of time in a state closer to indentured servitude), but it can also refer to servants.
[113] James W. Watts argued that Hellenistic culture and Roman law played a more significant role than the Bible in late antique and medieval Jewish and Christian slave-owning practices.
In the early modern period, mercantilism was another factor, with John Calvin declaring that "economic circumstances rendered the biblical laws redundant".
Watts suggested that they used the Bible's two-tier model to justify enslaving Africans and Native Americans while limiting white forced laborers to indentured servants and prisoners.
[120][full citation needed][121] Abolitionists cited both the Old and New Testaments to argue for manumission, and against kidnapping or "stealing men" to own or sell them as slaves, while pro-slavery pastors used biblical texts to legitimize the institution of slavery.
