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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And despite my cheery demeanor and the way this all sounds word-wise, we're going to talk about horrifying things that involve death and torture today. Maybe you're having the kind of day where you're like, you know what? That'd be great for how things are going. Maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't need to be any kind of certain day and you're just up for it and you trust that we're going to have a mature, helpful adult conversation. Maybe today's just not the day for you. And I thought, given what we're going to talk about, it would just be cool to give you a heads up. So this is the heads up. There's my disclaimer. That said, I like the internet. I think it's pretty cool. Uh, this is not my favorite iteration or era of the internet. My favorite era of the internet was the early internet, the wild west. Everybody just takes the best, coolest stuff they thought of before the internet and just barfs it onto the internet, and everything is hilarious and weird and interesting. And who knows what's going to happen next. And corporations haven't really caught on to it yet. So it isn't all cheapened and dumb. There aren't stupid ads everywhere. It's just things happen. Who knows what's going to go on next? I don't like it as much as the current era, the Mr. Beastification of everything, the play the algorithmic game, the super corporatized era, but whatever. Here you and I are in that era doing the scrappy independent media thing together. Like it's just us. There's not too many like that anymore. It's kind of cool that we're still here. But there were things that I liked about my childhood before the internet happened. And one of those things was innocence because mine was preserved much longer than someone who was born 10 years after me, 15 years after me. I had, and this is the part where it gets uh a little bit grisly, by the way. I'm sorry for that. I had never seen an image, let alone a video, of somebody dying in my entire life until I was uh it was my senior year. Now, I watched the Challenger explosion live when I was a little, little kid, but I I mean I didn't get it. And it's it's like, you know, it's a V, you know, there are people in there abstractly, but like I didn't see a person die. But my probably my senior year, my social studies or history teacher was like, hey, you don't have to look at this, but these are a couple of really important images as we're talking about Vietnam here. And I'm gonna give you the option to look at them. I'm gonna kind of describe what's going on here anyway because this is important. And you can probably picture what two images he showed. We saw a picture of a Viet Cong guy getting executed, and it is the moment of the gunshot, and it's it's horrifying. It's burned in my brain. Maybe I shouldn't have looked, but I did, and I I kind of crossed uh an emotional Rubicon in that moment. I did lose some innocence in that moment. Maybe it was the age where I needed to, I don't I don't know. And then the other one was the Tibetan monk self-imolating. That I mean, obviously both of those stick with me greatly. The other images that I remember that really pushed me that way were images of slavery, but the images were so old that they didn't have the same impact because the media that communicated it was like the photography and primitive, not really great drawings and art to depict it. So I could picture that it was bad, but it still felt pretty abstract. I didn't feel like I was witnessing all of the evils. What burned into my brain were a couple of the firsthand accounts that got read to us of some of the worst expressions of slavery in the American South. And wow, I I lost some innocence on that day as well. I just couldn't believe anybody could be like that. And I'd met some turds at that point in my life. I mean, we'd had some people who had acted badly at church, for example. My dad was a pastor, and we'd had some people who were kind of, you know, not scandalous, but just mean. And I could tell they were mean to my dad, even though my dad wouldn't complain about people at home. He was really dignified about that kind of thing. But you know, I'm not an idiot. I can tell people are being jerks. So I saw that, and that kind of, you know, that was a loss of innocence moment to be like, oh, sometimes adults are mean and gossipy and dumb and childish to each other. Saw some stuff in the news about people being bad to each other, but the slavery thing, and particularly the torture thing, I just couldn't believe it. There was one account, and I I don't know if this one is apocryphal. I have no clue what the source is on this. I'm remembering something from however many years ago from when I was in school. So if you know about this story and you're like, no, that's totally made up, yeah, you can tell me. So I quit repeating it as though it happened, but it was definitely read to me. And it was a story about a slave who did something in the American South, and he had a particularly evil, awful master who wanted to make examples of people. And he did this like torture thing in the Southern Sun, where he soaked apparently like some rope or some leather in water, and he tied this slave to a tree. And then as it dried, it tightened and injured or killed or maimed the slave or whatever, as like an example to everybody else. That's the story that stands out to me. And you can see why you know I gave you a content warning here because it sticks with you. It's it's awful. And you know, I was contrasting the pre-internet days with the post-internet days, and I I guess the reason I started there is because, well, when was the last time I saw someone die on camera or uh in image? Um three minutes before I got on this microphone. I scrolled X and I guess somebody found some new footage of um this idiot who shot some CEO of a company or something in the back while he's just walking down the street. Some people lionize this guy. I cannot believe that, by the way. I I didn't want to see the video of that guy getting killed. It's just boom, there it is, no context, no nothing. That's like the tenth time that's happened to me this year that I just with no warning. Now, other times I've been like, well, you know, what's going on here? This isn't a famous scene. I don't know exactly what's happening. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, then that guy probably didn't survive that. So now, you know, just innocence be damned, right? Like, let's just throw all of the harshest words humanity can invent. Let's use them callously and recklessly in online gaming, online discourse. Heck, let's have our politicians say that kind of stuff, and let's have our celebrities and our heroes and our, you know, athletic heroes say it into microphones. Let's just run with it. It's it's like really the internet era has kind of doomed childhood innocence. And I do think that's a pity. I think that's lousy, but uh, not the point of the episode, forgive me. There really was something shocking, something that you know sticks with you when you first realize the horrors of what happened in recent global slavery, and again, the slavery that is closest to me and probably many of you in terms of cultural historical proximity is, you know, here in the American South, even though that's you know now 160 plus years in the rearview mirror. And I suppose it just follows that when you're talking about just what the institution of slavery is, that violence to keep people in line, to keep adults in line, who a quote, master imagines they quote, own, the threat of violence would be enough to keep some people in line. Probably some sense of personal duty or integrity would be enough to keep others in line. But probably some people are gonna have a little bit of a feisty independence streak, like me. And it's probably gonna take a lot more to quote keep somebody like that in line. Well, as I dug through all of these ancient sources, I was actually somewhat heartened to find that I came across about as many references to withholding violence and showing restraint and patience with slaves as a cultural expectation or even as a legal expectation. I found about as many references to that as I did to references to, hey, when a slave does this, you got to whoop them up. Now, I was an American history, I don't know, professor, what do you call it? I taught at a lot of different colleges for a very long time in this country and in another country. And in the course of doing that, I taught a bunch on American history and of course on slavery in the American South. And so I did a kind of similar survey of primary sources on slavery in the American South. And in doing so, you know, I did come across quite a bit of stuff that runs counter to the uh well-earned and very fair narrative of how horrible it was. Well, like anything, you know, there were very notable exceptions. And of course, the most horrible aspects of it are going to be the things that are jarring to us and stick with us. So, you know, I was cool in doing that work to be like, oh, okay, there were, you know, on the spectrum of slavery, which is all on the bad side of the equation, there were varying degrees of awful, ranging up to, huh, that was actually within the boundaries of that institution. That was about as charitable as you can be. However, the balance of what I found on primary sources in American history was much bleaker than the balance that I found on sources in terms of violence and punishment towards slaves in ancient history. The long story short of all of it is uh, yeah, people beat their slaves back then. People have beaten their slaves in every context in which slavery has probably ever existed. I did not come across elaborate tortures for slaves to keep them in line, though I did come across elaborate tortures and execution methods for slaves who led rebellions up to and including public crucifixion. The idea of slave rebellion, which is something that we'll get to in a future conversation, was something that I think terrified the ancients. I think they knew how fragile their arrangement was, and that if the scales ever started to tip, it could get pretty crazy. But let me give you a couple of excerpts from stuff that I found about, I guess this counts as my sixth big observation from studying ancient slavery. My sixth big observation is there certainly was physical punishment of slaves, but anything that crossed over into deep cruelty or torture was reserved for slaves who had committed treason or rebellion or murder. And look, I'm not trying to justify torture, I'm against torture. But I was somewhat heartened to find that apparently torture was not a regular accepted practice. And in fact, if a master did something like that, they could be legally liable for overstepping their bounds, which I thought was interesting. All right, a couple of readings here. I've already lingered on this more than I want to. I don't like it. Uh, here are some remarks from uh an educated slave who received his freedom uh first century BC, around the time of Julius Caesar and all of that stuff. He just made a handful of remarks about truisms of slavery at that time and what you see, what you experience from that. This is from Publilius Cyrus. He writes, There are risks in being tame, but being so makes you a slave. It is beautiful to die instead of being degraded as a slave. Whoever helps his country is the slave of his people. Modesty is also a kind of slavery. If you serve wisely, you will have some share in the master's role. If you don't like being a slave, you will be miserable, but you won't stop being a slave. I don't know why I wrote this one down. I don't think it serves as a great primary source on torture and punishment, other than the absence of him talking about it much. I think I just wrote it down because I thought it was really interesting to hear from a slave. I don't know, whatever. This one is more on track. This is from another legal digest. Oh, this is uh from Ulpian. I I know this one a little bit. All right. Uh this yeah, this one's about the torture. Uh, torture against slaves should be employed as the last resort. That's nice. I I guess. I mean, you hope it would be no resort. Torture against slaves should be employed as the last resort at a point when someone is suspected of having committed the crime, and proof is not quite forthcoming from other arguments, so that it seems that the only step that is still missing is an admission by slaves. So that's pretty bleak. Uh, if you can't extract data or information or evidence from anybody else, uh, you could just torture a bystander who doesn't want to snitch. I'm not gonna read you a bunch of these other quotes. I mean, it they all basically say the same thing. Like, hey, some beating is cool. We're gonna allow that socially, we're gonna allow that legally, but there's sort of this nebulous idea across Greek and Roman law that eh, that can be too much. And if it is too much, you could be criminally liable. But it seems like for the most part, the limits that I kept encountering in these readings was that you can't execute your own slaves. You can get permission to if they've done something deeply criminal, like murdered a member of your household or whatever. I mean, that's obviously pretty bleak, that a degree of physical punishment is just expected for certain types of stubborn slaves. But again, I was rather surprised by the amount of language, the amount of words that were spent on putting restraints on this, and even the amount of language that was spent on talking about the role of the master, the expectation culturally that they would serve as the protector of their slaves, even for their slaves who hadn't behaved quite perfectly. And next time around, my next big observation will be there were actually a lot of limits on this. It doesn't make the institution noble or good or pure by any means, but society definitely had an expectation of restraint. I think as we kind of add up these observations about the carrot and the stick and the limits of what you can't do to a slave or shouldn't do to a slave, and the idea of running away, which we haven't got to yet, and what you do about that, it at least for me, it's giving me a much fuller picture of the situation that we're dealing with here with Colossians and Philemon. All right, that wasn't the most pleasant. I don't know how to handle it. I'm sure it could be done better. Thanks for your patience with me. We had to cover it. We covered it. On to the next thing. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again.