Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and today is going to be more pleasant than yesterday. That's good. One time I was in the developing world, and I was on a bus, public transportation, and I'd been on some buses there before, but this one was worse than the other buses I'd ever been on. There were a lot of animals on the bus. There were a lot of smells on the bus. There were people who weren't doing very well on the bus. It wasn't a bus you would want to be on in a place that you would not want to be on a bus. But if you had to be on the bus, if you absolutely had to be on that bus, you would have wanted the seat that I had, which was the very front corner next to the permanently open bus door. It broke, I guess. It didn't have the closey thing. So you just got as much fresh air as you could possibly get in that otherwise stale, stagnant, very, very stinky, terrible bus. Likewise, nobody wants to be on the ancient world slavery bus. It's stinky, it's awful. As we discussed last time, there's going to be corporal punishment, some beatings, probably some occasional torture if things got crazy enough. It's not a bus that you want to be on, but if you have to be on that bus, you would want the metaphorical seat by the door where you're in a society that has laws that protect you as a slave, laws that incentivize manumission in a reasonable amount of time, laws that allow for some degree of ownership of property, of accumulation, and laws that restrain a crappy master's darker impulses to mistreat you to even greater degrees than that which is automatically inherent to the institution of slavery. So, what we've been doing over the last few days is I have been giving you, reporting back to you, my big observations about slavery in the ancient world after having read hundreds of primary sources on this. This does not mean that I am the expert. I mean, I'm looking at other people's work and other people's aggregation of all of these sources. I'm sure there's plenty more data out there that I haven't found yet, but yeah, it's a pretty good sample size. And so far, my great big observations are as follows. Number one, slavery in the ancient world wasn't racist, it was classist. Number two, there are a lot of different ways to become a slave. Number three, the ancients believed that slaves were morally illiterate, ethically incompetent, yet, conflictingly, they expected them to behave with moral excellence and they'd punish them if they didn't. Number four kind of tempers number three, kind of goes hand in hand with number three. It seems like a lot of the ancients didn't think slaves were inherently evil, just, you know, less and worse. And that slavery, if done right, was really a mercy when you consider the alternatives to slavery. It was pretty good. That seems to be what they thought back then. Observation number five: manumission was a very real thing, a very real possibility, and it was outlined with all kinds of laws, and it was encouraged as a carrot, as an incentive to do well during your time in slavery, that you might meet the goals and be released in a reasonable amount of time to go start building your own fortune and probably eventually go get your own slaves, because that's how people thought back then. Number six, which we discussed yesterday, as you would expect with any kind of slavery anywhere, physical violence and coercion were part of the deal. But as we also discussed yesterday, there were observation number seven for today, limits. More limits than I expected to find, more excerpts, more quotes, more laws, more parameters, more expectations on masters to lighten up a little bit. Let me just cut right to it and read you some of what I came across. This is from Dio Cassius. Because it was not possible to order a slave to be tortured to give evidence against his own master, Augustus ordered that whenever the necessity for something like this should arise, so nobody's speaking up about what happened, something horrible happened, we're gonna have to extract it from a slave. The slave should be sold to the public treasury or to himself, so that he could be interrogated on the grounds that he was not the property of the accused. It's weird, it kind of has like dark echoes of taking the fifth almost. Some people expressed opposition to this since the change of ownership was making the law meaningless, while others claimed that it was essential since many people were organizing plots both against the emperor and against the authorities as a result of that provision. I probably read more to you there than you needed to hear. You have to read between the lines a little bit, and I'd have to give you a lot more to make it really make sense. But implicit in this is that a master could protect a slave and be like, no, don't testify on any of that. You're not going to be tortured. The authorities can't torture you. You belong to this household, they will have to go through me. And so during the era of Emperor Augustus, which is, you know, like the time around when Jesus was born, a governmental loophole, a governmental workaround was put in place, which was like imminent domaining a slave to get them away from the protection of a master who would not torture them or force them to testify, so that the state could buy them and then torture them to make them testify. It's kind of a bleak positive, but I see some degree of positive there. Here's another barely positive from the era of Athens that would include Xerxes' invasion and Plato and Socrates and all of that stuff. In that era in Athens, there was a wealthy Athenian who owned slaves, and he got murdered by somebody. Presumably, a certain slave was involved in this. And so the heirs of that wealthy Athenian just executed this family slave. But then the Athenian democracy kicked in, and they were like, uh, but he didn't even get to testify in court. You can't just go around executing slaves. I mean, we might have executed him. We do that sometimes as Athens, but for something that serious, the slave still should have been allowed to testify, and his fate should have been decided publicly. Again, it doesn't sound like much, but what I just described is kind of a little fraction of sort of a right. It ain't good enough, but it's something. All right, here's another one of those Roman legal digests, and this is bleak, but when a slave has been given up to wild beasts, punishment applies not just to the person who sold him, but also to the person who bought him. So here they're saying, like, at this point, we don't just feed slaves to animals for sport or for punishment. That is cruel and unusual. And whoever sold that slave for those purposes, and whoever bought that slave for those purposes is going to be punished. Again, it's a very low bar, but you come away with the impression that at least there was some kind of expectation in place that a slave wouldn't be treated in that way. Let me lighten the mood just a little bit with a more pleasant example. This is from Seneca, and I think this is going to blow your mind. That's the effect it had on me. This one was like a drink of cool water in the desert when I came across what Seneca had to say here. Uh, it goes like this Why do I have to punish my slave with a whipping or imprisonment if he gives me a cheeky answer or a disrespectful look or mutters something that I can't quite hear? Is my status so special that offending my ears should be a crime? There are many people who've forgiven defeated enemies. Am I not to forgive someone for being lazy or careless or talkative? If he's a child, his age alone should excuse him. If female, her sex, okay, that was sexist, but we're just gonna roll with it. If he doesn't belong to me, his independence should excuse it. And if he does belong to my household, the ties of family should excuse it. Dang! Now, is that not the most pleasant one of these I've read so far? I mean, first of all, just the uh a degree of self-criticism from one of these people and self-awareness is refreshing. The come on, elites, why are we so sensitive? Are we so weak that somebody says something mean to us? We're like, oh, have that man clapped in irons and whipped. Settle down. So somebody griped about you, people complain about their bosses, relax. Why is that a crime? Is your status so special that having your ears offended should get somebody whipped? I love that line. And then he goes on to give all the reasons to cut people slack. It's so gracious. I mean, we forgive our defeated enemies, they were trying to kill us. We can forgive people for being a little bit lazy or a little bit sloppy or a little bit chatty, even a little bit gossipy. And then I love the way he goes through the reasons. If it's a kid, let him off the hook because it's it's a little kid. If it's a woman, well, okay, again, I'm not saying that I agree with this, but in ancient terms, this was gracious in its own way. If he doesn't belong to me, well, he's not mine to whip. And if he does, how about that last line? If he does belong to my household, the ties of family should excuse him. Now that's interesting. Think about Philemon, think about Paul's request, think about the language that Paul is using surrounding Philemon, and then think about what Seneca said right there. Funny thing about Seneca is he was like practically a year for year, two circles over the top of each other, fully shaded circle, Venn diagram, like exact contemporary of the Apostle Paul. Probably Seneca didn't influence Paul, and Paul didn't influence Seneca. But think about Paul's request to Philemon. None of that clashes with what Seneca is saying. I mean, Seneca's coming to these conclusions from some sort of, you know, moral reasoning, abstract, godless moral reasoning, but huh. Yeah, I really like that one. I wanted to linger on it for a minute. Let me read you just a couple more real quick. This is uh Plutarch, I think, writing about Cato the Elder, if I have my facts straight. He says, I myself regard someone who uses slaves like pack animals and drives them away and sells them when they get old as unbalanced, since he thinks that the only bond between people is their need. But we consider that humanity goes much further than just strict justice. Huh. Well, listen to that. Some of these people clearly viewed slaves as much more than cheap disposable tools to use Aristotle's language from a few hundred years earlier. I mean, this is kind of a nice comment right there. I would really appreciate that if I were a slave. Yeah. I mean, think about what one of your fears would be if somebody did view you as just a human tool. Well, what happens if I get old? Like my body's breaking down. Instead of feeling some sense of security at the end of that, like your fate is to get driven away or starved or sent to the island of lost slaves, as some were. I mean, way to go, Plutarch writing about Cato the Elder. Again, this isn't me saying, boy, oh boy, do I like slavery. No, no, no. This is a bus you don't want to be on. But these passages are describing having the good seat on the awful bus with the open window that kind of vents things out and gives you a little bit of cool air, at any rate. Okay, a second ago I referenced slaves being sent to the island of, you know, the Lord of the Flies island when they got too old. And wow, I think this is a great one. This is from Seutonius writing about the Emperor Claudius. He makes an appearance in the Bible. Here we go. Certain individuals were leaving six slaves and those worn out with age on the island of Aesculapius because they thought they wouldn't get better. Claudius decreed that all who had been abandoned in this way were to be free and would not return under their master's authority if their health improved. And if anyone preferred to kill a slave rather than abandon him, he was liable to a charge of murder. Well, good job, Claudius. I mean, of course, we all read these relatively comparatively nice things, and we're like, well, why didn't y'all just have the courage to just abolish slavery then? Well, nobody seems to be thinking of that quite yet. I think that would be like somebody saying now, like, we should just abolish the economy. And maybe there's like a sophomore communist at Berkeley or something who thinks we should uh whatever abolish the economy. But uh no, I that's just it's unthinkable to us. Buying and selling things is that's how the it's how the world works. Well, people back then thought this was how the world works, but really, I mean, all these sources, hundreds of sources, nobody is saying just get rid of it. So now the stinking bus you don't want to be on seems like that was just gonna be a bus, and that a lot of people were gonna be on that bus in the ancient world. But the stuff we talked about today, man. Um I like that such a seat on that bus existed. I like that some powerful people, though they clearly by our standards did not go far enough. I like that they at least thought about this stuff. By comparison, I think what Paul is saying takes that vastly even further than the most forward-thinking, gentle, best seat on the slavery bus thinkers and thoughts that I read to you today. Look, even though I don't like the thing we're studying, I really like studying it. Does that make sense? I think that's okay. I understand this way better than I used to. I hope you feel like you're getting your feet under you on this subject matter as well, and we'll try and take some more ground on it tomorrow. I really appreciate you. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.