Johnny Scholar

This is what I observed when first reading the passage for myself. I walked into the office of one of my colleagues and told him this very thing. He told me that he didn't see how this text could possibly condone the harm reality of slavery.

It shows that people want to see what they want to see.

andrewcriddle

I don't think it is a particularly strong endorsement of a system to say that it is morally different to be punished for breaking the rules compared to being punished without having broken the rules.

To take a more or less modern example if you're a conscript in the army then even for those who oppose conscription there is IMO a difference between being punished as part of the general bullying endemic to the system and being punished for repeatedly turning up to parade over ten minutes late.

IMO the fact that you didn't want to be in the army and don't believe the government should make people join the army unwillingly, still doesn't make the difference between punishment for genuine military offences and punishment for no real cause go away.

The author of 1 Peter doesn't want Christian slaves to take pride in being punished for doing their jobs badly. I don't see that as necessarily involving a belief that slavery is in itself a good institution.

Andrew Criddle

chapka

I think switching the example to the military, even to conscription, avoids the underlying point. Slavery is not an arguably just institution. I think a better example would be kidnap rather than conscription.

Is there a moral difference between being beaten by your kidnappers for no reason and being beaten by them for not cooperating with them? To answer yes implies that the kidnappers, merely by virtue of being kidnappers, have a moral authority such that disobedience would render your punishment "justified." Either way, the kidnapper has no moral authority to punish you; in my view, either way, the punishment is unjustified. So if you feel that conscription is the moral equivalent of kidnap, then no, I don't think you'd feel there was a difference between the different types of bullying inherent in the system.

andrewcriddle

It's a difficult point I can see arguments both ways.

I think being kidnapped by a small criminal gang is probably a special case, and rather different from slavery as a (bad) social institution.

If you take the case of being abducted by the other side in a civil war then IMHO there is a real difference between being beaten as part of general abuse and being beaten for say acts of sabotage against your abductors.

Andrew Criddle

chapka

Only because you've internalized a code of behavior that allows taking prisoners as a legitimate part of war. Slavery being a social institution makes the practical consequences different than for kidnapping, but I don't see that it makes a moral difference.

PDH5204

Please read Philemon. What does that other Paul say? Something about....I could command you do to the thing fitting [the right thing]....? And what does that say about that other Paul and his thoughts on slavery?

And as Mr. Criddle alluded to, in the old old old days, if you did not own land, you were screwed. And that's why the Torah prescribes two things....the land first and always reverts back to its ancestral family owner[s] and when it does all JEWISH slaves, WHO NOW HAVE ACCESS TO THEIR LAND AGAIN, are freed to return to their land. We today think of slavery as an absolute evil, but our former American slavery was nothing like the ancient practice and, more to the point, in an agricultural society you were screwed if you did not own land and at least your slave master was otherwise obligated to keep you fed, clothed, and sheltered, even during those times when your labor [or lack thereof] was of no benefit to your master whatsoever. But, again, if you were Jewish, and your land was going to be returned to you, so that you would then be in a position to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself, you were freed. And that is why none of the "stranger" slaves [as it were] were freed, as there was no guarantee that there would be any land for them to go back to, and if they had been freed anyway, then just who was going to feed, cloth, and shelter this landless soul in a society that was about 99.9999999% agricultural? And if you are thinking hired labor, please take a class in economics so that you can become aware of your labor value in an agricultural society with a labor surplus. Try next to none. You can otherwise skip the class and simply speak with our migrant farm workers about their fair labor rate.

P.S. Gullwind. You no longer have the excuse of slavery as a basis to reject Yeshua as kyrios.

Vorkosigan

Yes, ancient slavery was much, much worse. A small class of slaves who worked as household slaves could achieve a decent life, but most slaves lived hellish lives that were nasty, brutish, and short. If you worked as a field hand, hunting or gathering in the forest, or on a work gang in Rome, or a miner, you had a life expectancy of less than 10 years as a slave. Revolts were a fact of life. The vast majority of slaves in the ancient world were illiterates who functioned as machinery for economic production, nothing more. I responded several years ago to Daniel Wallace, a scholar who also writes apologetically, on this issue[/url].

Legally, perhaps. But the reality of the situation was that in you were dead quite soon. There was an inexhaustible supply of slaves, and they were treated with utter contempt and indifference, except for a tiny minority of educated household slaves.

Perhaps it is you who should go back. You are talking not about the value of labor, but of the marginal value of labor. You might also try taking a course in economic history. Rome was not 99.999999% agricultural, but in fact operated a complex economy with a small class of educated workers, banking, shops, and other capitalist structures, and some manufacturing, as well as considerable trade, both within the Empire, and with Persia, India, and China.

Yes, it remains. Do you think human beings with life expectancies of ten years, chained at night in underground jails, worked like animals during the day and fed on scraps, should, or should not be freed? Simple question, and Paul's answer was "no."

Vorkosigan

Chili

It looks like the land owner is screwed today if he has to prostitude farm workers.

andrewcriddle

The site referenced
http://faculty.vassar.edu/jolott/old...slavelife.html
(I'm giving the current URL the one in the old idb article doesn't work) seems sensible but I have some reservations.

A slave on a Latin plantation/latifundia had an awful life but I find the ten year life expectancy a bit surprising. (Slaves in mines had a shorter life expectancy less than five years but they were deliberately worked to death.) Firstly it's very hard to do this sort of actuarial/demographic study for the ancient world the data often isn't there. Secondly the idea of an inexhaustible supply of slaves is not straightforwardly true. It was more or less true in the late Republic (the time of the great slave revolts in Sicily and Italy) as a consequence of vast numbers of people being enslaved as part of Roman conquests. In the Roman Empire such vast supplies of new slaves become much less frequent and slaves are probably too valuable as property to be routinely worked to death.

It may be worth noting that the referenced article is talking about the background to Spartacus ie the situation in the late Republic.

Also although there were far more brutally treated plantation slaves than relatively well treated household slaves it may be misleading to talk about a 'tiny minirity' of domestic slaves. The proportion of domestic slaves was IIUC about 10-20% of the total in Italy and substantially higher in the Greek speaking Roman Empire where agriculture is more based on serfdom than chattel slavery.
As I think spin noted earlier in the thread the NT writings are primarily thinking about urban slavery. (The use of OIKETAI in in 1 Peter makes the reference here to household slaves explicit).

The number of plantation slaves on work-gangs to become Christian was probably utterly negligible. (Early Christianity is a phenomenon of the towns and cities not the countryside and probably dispropotrtionately of the literate.) The slaves being recommended to be obedient to their masters are in practice urban household slaves.

As to wealthy early Christians the number with direct experience of the brutality of plantation life was probably very limited although the number whose wealth came directly or indirectly from plantations they rarely if ever visited would have been much larger.

It is a general problem with writers and moralists in the Ancient world that they seem little concerned with the way their urban lifestyle is based one way or another on the exploitation of workers in the countryside (In numerous ways of which chattel slavey is only the most extreme).

In defence of the Ancient world a/ such exploitation of agricultural workers by the towns and cities seems inevitable in one form or another before modern technology transformed farming and b/ modern parallels such as the exploitation of 'third world' workers by the affluent West are often a matter of little concern to writers in modern developed countries.

Andrew Criddle