Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible

and Theology
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Slavery in the Second Testament World

Carolyn Osiek
Biblical Theology Bulletin: A Journal of Bible and Theology 1992; 22; 174
DOI: 10.1177/014610799202200405

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BTB Readers Guide
SLAVERY IN THE SECOND TESTAMENT WORLD
CAROLYN OSIEK
Slaves, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not only under their eyes so as to please people, but in simplicity
of heart and fear of the Lord. Whatever you do, do it well, as for the Lord rather than people, knowing that you will receive
from the Lord the reward of an inheritance. Serve the Lord Christ (Col 3:22-25).
t~NY modem readers wonder how the early Chris-
Mtians could have lived with the institution of slavery
without seeming to question it-indeed, even to condone
and encourage it, as the above passage suggests. Since most
contemporary Americans are at least somewhat familiar
with colonial and pre-Confederate War slavery in the U. S.
with its connotations of plantations and racism, they tend
to carry those associations into their reading of the Second
Testament. In reality, though all slavery is terrible and
repugnant, the two institutions functioned quite differ-
erently (see comparison in Watson, ix-xix). The major
differences are that ancient slavery was neither race-spe-
cific nor racist (which is not to deny that racism existed
in the culture); there was no necessary assumption of
natural inferiority; and manumission or the acquisition of
freedom was quite common.
In slave society, the slave himself or
a
herself is the commodity.
A good introduction to the broad picture of slavery
in ancient Mediterranean society is given by Finley, An-
cient Slavery and Modern Ideology. After tracing the
modem history of scholarship on ancient slavery and
showing its ideological tendencies, he argues that the
concept of labor as a commodity is a modern one. In a
slave society, the slave himself or herself is the commod-
ity. Thus the power relationship is absolute: not only of
one person over the production of the other, but over the
other’s self. In a dyadic society, personhood is granted by
reason of embeddedness in kinship structures, the very
thing denied to the slave in any legally recognized way.
Thus the slave is an outsider to society in an essential way.
Though there is some continuity in the customs of
ancient slavery among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, a brief
consideration of the differences is helpful by way of
introduction.
174
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Ancient Israel
Certainly the practice of slavery was widespread in
the ancient Mediterranean world, but it differed accord-
ing to local laws and customs. Though ancient Israel was
not a slave economy, it knew several kinds of slavery.
Enforced enslavement, self-sale (Lev 25:39-40), or sale of
children for debt (2 Kings 4:1; Prov 22:7), and capture in
war (1 Sam 17:9) were the primary sources of slaves.
Bartchy/Hanson, &dquo;Slavery&dquo; (539~3) gives a good survey
of the practice in ancient Israel.
Jewish law differentiated between Jewish and Gen-
tile slaves of Jewish owners. According to the legal codes,
male Jews enslaved for debt could serve for only six years,
and had to be set free in the seventh unless they chose to
remain, including wives who had accompanied them into
slavery originally, but excluding wives or children ac-
quired in slavery. A woman sold into slavery as a concubine
had to be treated honorably as well; after the sixth year,
she had to be either married, given to a son to marry, or
set free; she could also be set free if not treated well (Exod
21:2-11). Later, Deuteronomy 15:12-18 applied the
same six-year limitation to female slaves as well, though
it seems to envisage physical labor rather than sexual
services as does the Exodus text. However, a female war
captive taken as a wife could not be sold (Deut 21:14).
The statute of Leviticus 25:10 that during the fiftieth
(jubilee) year everyone was to return to his/her own
family may reflect the same custom of freeing Jewish
slaves who had been sold as children.
It is often thought that Jewish enslavement of Jews
was no longer operative in Second Testament times, de-
Carolyn Osiek, RSCJ, Th.D. (Harvard University) is professor
of New Testament at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, IL
60615, New Testament Book Review Editor of the Catholic
Biblical Quarterly, and author of What Are They Saying about
the Social Setting of the New Testament? (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 2nd ed., 1992)....

spite numerous references in Talmudic literature. But
continued, as demonstrated by Urbach, &dquo;The Laws re-
garding Slavery.&dquo; Jews also continued to own Gentile
slaves, often circumcising and/or baptizing them. By this
time there may even have been a preference for non-Jew-
ish slaves because the laws about their treatment were not
so strict. Jewish ownership of non-Jewish slaves increased
during the Maccabean wars and the Hasmonean dynasty.
Generally the laws governing slavery at this time were the
same as the Hellenistic law to which the Jewish resisents
of the land of Israel and the Diaspora had been subject
under the Seleucids and Ptolemies, except that Has-
monean law did not require any continuing obligation of
the slave to a previous owner after manumission, nor did
it recognize different liability for injury to slave and free
person, therefore granting to the slave an unusual amount
of legal protection.
Of course, Jews were also enslaved by Gentiles in
large numbers, especially after the disastrous defeats of
70 and 134 CE. In this case, they were entirely subject to
Roman slave law.
Greco-Roman World
The standard introduction is Westermann, The
Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity. Wiede-
mann’s Greek and Roman Slavery is a useful collection of
primary sources. Slave economy as a mode of production
seems to have been an innovation of the Greek world and
its Roman successor.
There are two distinct situations of slavery in the
Greco-Roman world that merit separate description: ag-
ricultural, industrial, and penal slavery; and urban house-
hold, business, and imperial slavery. The two situations
were quite different.
In the classical, hellenistic, and early imperial peri-
ods, the large agricultural estates of Greece, Italy, and
later North Africa depended for labor largely on privately
owned slaves or landed peasants. Sometimes, however,
chain gangs of condemned criminals were also employed,
but there was widespread dissatisfaction with their work:
many complained of poor quality (e.g., Pliny the Elder,
NH 18.6.36), and the custom was dying out by the time
his nephew Pliny the Younger was administering his es-
tates at the end of the first century (Pliny the Younger,
Ep. 3.19.7). Other condemned criminals and prisoners of
war were used as galley slaves to row ships and to work in
mines. In these worst-cast scenarios, the horrible images
evoked by Hollywood spectaculars like Spartacus and Ben
Hur apply: the unhappy subjects normally remained in
their work until death. Even so, however, it must be
remembered that needless cruelty that would injure their
health was not practical and so probably not common, as
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175
it it would also injure the quality of work. Also to be
associated here is condemnation ad bestias, execution in
the amphitheatre by wild animals, or furca, some type of
crucifixion. This kind of capital sentence to galleys, mines,
or amphitheatre as a noxius or condemned criminal usu-
ally included reduction to legal slavery for those not
already slaves. The effect of this was confiscation of
property and the loss of most legal rights.
The second type of slavery in the urban situation
functioned quite differently. Here slaves were not only
performers of menial tasks, but often trusted agents and
administrators in business affairs. Many were highly edu-
cated, sometimes acquiring their education at the expense
of their owners in order to provide private tutors for the
minor children of the household. Paul’s comparison of the
Law as custodian (paidagogos: Gal 3:24-25) refers to a
slave responsible for the discipline of upper class school
boys. The stewards and administrators to whom the child
is further subjected (Gal 4:1 ) are also slaves.
Urban slaves were not an identifiable social class, but
were embedded in the class and status of their owners,
which could be institutions (city, temple) or private per-
sons of a variety of statuses: aristocrats, temple clientele,
merchants, shopkeepers, freeborn or freedmen/women.
Even slaves could own other slaves and profit from the
labor and income produced by them in order to build up
their own peculium or private bankroll.
Weaver’s Familia Caesaris introduces the imperial
civil service, a vast network of several thousand people
extending throughout the Roman Empire that was run
mostly by imperial slaves and freedmen (see Phil 4:22). It
managed the daily administrative business of the empire
and the imperially owned factories and farms as well. The
members of the system constituted a special social status
derivative of their proximity to political power. It is
generally thought that membership was not voluntary, but
depended on birth or sale. There is, however, the puzzing
letter fragment from Oxyrhynchos in Egypt in which an
unnamed sender reporting on persons known by the re-
cipient relates that a man named Herminos had gone off
to Rome and had become a freedman of Caesar (ape-
leutheros Kaisaros) in order to pursue the career
...
(opikia officium) of an imperial freedman (P.Oxy. 312;
=
text in New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, 3,
ed. G. H. R. Horsley; North Ryde: Macquarrie University,
1983, PP. 7-8).
RO MAN SLAVE LAW
We know a great deal about slavery within the
Roman legal system. The status of a child followed that of
itsmother, except in the case of a free woman cohabiting
with a slave (an indication in itself of the relative freedom
of many slaves), in which case the child followed the slave
176
status of the father. A male slave/free female liaison
violated the double standard that sexual relations of a
woman with a man beneath her status were unacceptable,
while the reverse was accepted except in the case of a
senator with a freedwoman. In the case of the exposure
of unwanted children, a common form of population
control, a foundling could be raised as either slave or free,
unless the original birth status could be ascertained, in
which case it remained in force.
Ambiguity is reflected in the legal codes regarding
the personhood of slaves. It must be remembered, how-
ever, that the modem reader would find the same ambi-
guity in ancient law with regard to the very concept of
&dquo;person,&dquo; which has to do here with legal rather than
philosophical or religious status. It is not until about the
sixth century, under the influence of the christological
debates and Christian theology that a working philosophi-
cal concept of person developed.
A slave was considered res, thing or property, under
the law; yet the legal status of a slave vis-a-vis the owner
did not differ in major respects from that of a child except
in matters of inheritance and succession. Restitution had
to be paid for injury to a slave, one-half that for a freed-
man. The owner was held legally liable for a slave’s
criminal actions, and gradual legislation limited the abso-
lute power of the owner over a slave, e.g., Hadrian’s
prohibition of castration included slaves; Antoninus Pius
extended the punishment for killing a slave to the slave’s
owner and limited excessive cruelty. Significantly, there
were no laws regarding sexual abuse of one’s own slave
(Watson, 119-22). Many prostitutes, both male and fe-
male, were slaves, and many female children sold by their
parents or raised as foundlings became prostitutes (T. A
J. MCGinn, &dquo;The Taxation of Roman Prostitutes,&dquo; Helios
16:1 [1989], 91-92; N. Kampen, Image and Status: Ro-
man Working Women in Ostia [Berlin: Mann, 1981 J,
chaps. 4-5).
The studies of Weaver and others have shown that
urban slaves had a high expectation of being freed in
middle adulthood, especially in their owners’ will, by
mutual agreement, or in recognition and reward for faith-
ful service. In addition, female slaves were frequently
freed for marriage to their previous owner or to another.
There were four formal means of manumission, automat-
ically conferring Roman citizenship if the owner was a
citizen: enrollment on the list of citizens (probably in-
creasingly obsolete in imperial times because the census
was not taken regularly); vindicta, by the legal claim that
the person had been wrongfully enslaved (often used
fictively with the cooperation of magistrates); by testa-
ment, either publicly or privately, with or without condi-
tions ; adoption by a citizen, which carried with it
automatic manumission. In addition, there were informal
ways: per epistulam, the simple declaration of intent in
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writing; inter amicos, orally before peer witnesses; and
from the time of Constantine, in ecclesia, a declaration
before church officials. Owners under the age of 20 could
not free their slaves except vindicta. In earlier years,
informal manumission did not normally include citizen-
ship, though increasingly it did. The Lex Aelia Sentia of 4
CE decreed that slaves freed even formally before the age
of 30 (unless freed vindicta) did not acquire citizenship.
In 212 CE citizenship was extended to all members of the
empire, thus making the distinction meaningless.
The classic studies of freedmen/women are Treg-
giari, Roman Freedmen during the Late Republic and Duff,
Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire. Once freed, the
former slave retained a particular kind of relationship as
client with his or her former owner as patron, even taking
the name of the patron: e.g., Eutychus, slave of citizen
Gaius Sempronius Paulus, would become Gaius Sem-
pronius Eutychus; Eutychia, female slave of the same
owner, would become Sempronia Eutychia. Often (but
not always) these name combinations reveal freed status.
Continuing rights of the patron fell in three catego-
ries :first, inheritance of half the client’s property except
in special cases where there were many children to inherit;
second, the right to obsequium, due respect, the giving of
gifts, defense or su pport of the patron in social or financial
need, immunity from lawsuit or hostile testimony on a
criminal charge; third, operae, a reasonable number of
days of work. A freedwoman remained under the author-
ity of her male patron as legal guardian, the potestas under
which theoretically all women remained; those who bore
four children, however, were exempted. A slave woman
freed for marriage with her owner could neither refuse
nor later divorce him.
Marriage contracted by any noncitizens, and there-
fore by slaves, was not legitimte marriage, not connubium
or justum matrimonium, but contubernium, and a child
bom of a relationship in which even one parent was a slave
was illegitimate (which seems to have been no bar to later
citizenship, however). Nevertheless, slave &dquo;marriages&dquo;
were generally respected by custom and sometimes im-
plicitly by law, e.g., the Lex Pompeia against parricide
applied also to slaves. But if a married free person was
legally enslaved, the legal marriage was dissolved (Watson,
75-80). There was a certain attraction to free women to
marry imperial slaves. Even if the marriage was legally
illegitimate, there was high probability that the slave
would advance in career and power and later be freed.
The institution of slavery was not without its con
games. Two in particular are known from the legislation
that attempts to control them. A man would &dquo;sell&dquo; his
friend as a slave; a third party would bring a legal declara-
tion that he was wrongfully enslaved; the slave would go
free, and the three would split the sale price. The legisla-

tion provided that the &dquo;slave&dquo; would actually be reduced
to slavery if he had shared in the profit (Watson, 9).
Another racket was initiated by a runaway slave,
who would go to a professional slave catcher with his or
her peculium, or nestegg. The catcher woul d approach the
owner, buy the slave for a nominal amount, &dquo;find&dquo; the
slave, keep or split the peculium with the slave, and either
free or resell the slave according to previous agreement.
Various laws sought to prevent this familiar fraud, such as
providing that the slave who had participated in the deceit
could not go free for ten years (Watson, 65-66).
Much evidence of this indicates that slaves
nature
and freedmen/women were an integral part of urban
society, participating in the social class and status of the
social unit to which they belonged.
Second Testament
Bartchy/Hanson, &dquo;Slavery,&dquo; surveys the material re-
garding slavery in the Second Testament, as does Osiek,
&dquo;Slavery in the New Testament World.&dquo;
Slaves appear quite frequently in the Second Testa-
ment, sometimes disguised by translation as &dquo;servants,&dquo;
&dquo;stewards,&dquo; etc. They appear in gospel parables (e.g., Matt
13:27, 28; 21:35 36; see especially 18:23-34 as illustra-
tion of the continuation of debt slavery in Israel); in stories
from Acts (e.g., Acts 16:16-19), and in the Pauline cor-
respondence ( Cor 7:21-23) . The most famous slave of
the Pauline circle is Onesimus, about whom Paul wrote
his Letter to Philemon. Whether or not Onesimus was
really a runaway, whether or not Paul expected Philemon
to manumit him upon his return, it is clear from the letter
that Philemon is not well pleased with his slave, and Paul
expects him, contrary to what the honor code would
suggest, to be fully reconciled.
Besides Onesimus, there are other names that are
usually associated with slave origin, e.g., Tychicos (Acts
20:4 and elsewhere). Erastus, the Corinthian city treas-
urer, may well have been a servus publicus , or municipal
slave (Rom 16:23). There are also figures in the Pauline
circle who bear aristocratic Roman names and are surely
not aristocrats, e.g., the Jewish couple Prisca and Aquila;
Junia (Rom 16:7). Since it was customary upon manumis-
sion to take the personal name of one’s former owner,
both those bearing usual slave names and those bearing
upperclass Roman names are likely to be freed-
men/women or descendants thereof. Besides these slaves
or freedpersons mentioned in the Second Testament, we
know of other early Christian slaves: Hermas, who after
being freed wrote his revelation, the Shepherd, in early
second-century Rome; Blandina, a heroic female slave
who amazed everyone by her endurance in pain and who
became the rallying point for the martyrs of Lyons and
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177
Vienne about 177 C.E.; Felicitas, the pregnant slave
woman arrested and martyred after the birth of her child
in Carthage about 203 C.E. with Perpetua and her com-
panions ; Callistus, a Roman slave condemned to the mines
and later reprieved, to become eventually bishop of rome
(Hippolytus, Ref. 9.12).
The ransoming of slaves, probably those enslaved for
debt, was apparently seen as a Christian work of mercy
(1 Clem. 55.2); Shepherd of Hermas Mand. 8.10; sim.
1.10; perhaps Ign. Pol. 4.3). Possible models for this
custom include Jewish practices and those of some colle-
gia, or lowerclass associations, for their members (Bartchy
1985: 100-03). This is
the context for the
probably
expectation in some of Asia Minor in the
communities
early second century that slaves can be freed by drawing
on common church funds (Ign. Pol. 4.3). When Ignatius
writes to the Roman community that he has never met,
he makes it clear that he is dying willingly, and asks them
not to intervene (Ign. Rom. 4.1). This probably implies
their attempt to buy his freedom, lost in the condemna-
tion to death.
Slavery as Second Testament metaphor is thor-
oughly explored by Martin, Slavery As Salvation. He
argues that because being a slave/minister of a high-status
person was in fact a prestigious position, the metaphorical
appellation of Christians as slaves of God or of Christ is
an expression, not at all of humility, but of exaltation: see
especially the self-designation of Paul and companions in
Rom 1:1; Phil 1:1; Gal 1:10; Titus l:l, etc., but most
surprisingly as slaves of the community (2 Cor 4:5).
The Pauline writings also use the commonplace
imagery of slavery to vice and sin (e.g., Rom. 6:16; Gal.
5:1). When Ignatius refers to himself as condemned crimi-
nal (katakritos) and slave (doulos), who with suffering and
death will become Christ’s freedman (apeleutheros), he is
of course echoing 1 Cor 7:23 and Paul’s use of slave
(doulos) for himself, but there may be more to it than that,
since some legal evidence indicates that condemnation ad
bestias (to death in the arena by wild animals) also in-
cluded reduction to legal slavery (Ign. Rom. 4.3; cf. Trall.
3.3; Eph. 12.1 ).
Most troublesome to modem readers is the advice
to slaves in the so-called household codes of Col 3:22-25;
Eph 6:5-8; 1 Pet 2:18-25). They give us indirect evidence
of the abundant presence of slaves in the Christian com-
munities, probably most often members of entire ex-
tended households who belonged. Slaves are admonished
to be obedient, submissive, even to suffer wrongfully in
imitation of the suffering Christ. I Cor 7:21-23 assures
slaves that their legal status gives them no disadvantage as
Christians. Though the enigmatic v 21 is often interpreted
as meaning that the slave given the opportunity for free-
dom should profit from continued slave status, Barrchy
argues, in MALLON CHRESAI, that because the choice
178

for slavery or freedom rested solely with the owner, not widespread. There were, however, still large numbrs of
with the slave, the sentence cannot mean this, but must agricultural slaves in the fifth and sixth centuries, but it
instead mean that, given freedom, the former slave can was a social institution that by this time was dying out

also profit from it. Strangely, the old RSV translation of (Finley, Ancient Economy, 86-94). Certain pieces of Con-
the passage opted for this latter and more contextualized stantinian legislation motivated by Christian principles
meaning, while the new RSV reverses that decision. When restricted its practice in certain circumstances, but by no
Ignatius advises Polycarp not to use community funds to means attempted to eliminate it.

ransom slaves, it is lest they become &dquo;slaves of greed&dquo; (Ign.

to Pol. 4.3).

Slavery as an institution was taken for granted and Conclusion

not questioned. Within the institution, Christian teaching
attempted to humanize the relationships. Mistreatment Having some understanding of the ways in which
of slaves in both Roman and Jewish moral ideology indi-
cated weakness of character on the part of the one in
slavery functioned in the ancient Mediterranean social
system can give the modern interpreter a more accurate
power. Restraint, discipline, and evenness were the ideal. historical sense of the social systems of the world of the
Family cohesion required respect and harmony. So Second Testament. Some institutions and practices of
Philemon was expected by Paul to take back Onesimus that culture may seem inconceivable to us. Doubtless
&dquo;no longer as a slave ... but as a beloved brother&dquo; in a new
many of ours will be the same for future generations.
mode of Christian fictive kinship (Phlm 16). The slowly
growing perception of moral equality among &dquo;brothers&dquo;
and &dquo;sisters,&dquo; already pondered by the Stoics, was begin-
ning to create cultural complications in a society in which
Bibliography
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patron. But it would be many centuries before substantial Bartchy, S. Scott
social change would happen. 1985 MALLON CHRESAI: First Century Slavery and
1 Corinthians 7:21. SBLDS 11. Missoula, MT:
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well. Both social attitudes and legal penalties discrimi- 1908 The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the
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