Well, well, well, if it isn't our last day talking about big observations about slavery from the ancient world based on the few hundred ancient sources I went and read. I'm ready to be done with this part. I, you know, I don't like slavery very much, but like I was saying at the end of our last conversation, dang, I've learned a lot. Feel like I get a lot better than I used to. We're talking about Philemon. Philemon is a book that has a slavery question right at the heart of the issue. What happens when you crash? One of the bleakest expressions of the darkness of sinful humanity right up against the gospel of Christ. What's going to win? What's going to happen? That's what, in part, Philemon is about. I think more than anything, it's about reconciliation in light of the gospel, but you can't avoid the slavery question. And boy, oh boy, have we ever not avoided it in our conversations? Let me quickly recap what the observations we've made so far are, and then we're gonna get the last ones in. Number one, slavery in the ancient world was not racist, it was classist. Number two, there were a lot of ways to become slaves. Number three, people back then thought slaves were morally incompetent, yet conflictingly held them to high expectations of their moral behavior. Number four, nicely, people back then didn't really think slaves were evil per se, just simple and less and morally incompetent. And they believed in many cases slavery could be a mercy and better than other alternatives. Number five, manumission was real. It happened a lot, there were many pathways to it, it was idealized and it was considered noble. Number six, the physical punishment of slaves, sometimes even gruesomely, was a thing in the ancient world, but number seven, it was frowned upon. There were all kinds of limits as we move through history toward the time of the New Testament. We looked at a bunch of those limits yesterday. And then the Apostle Paul, with what he says in the New Testament and particularly what he requests of Philemon in the letter of Philemon, he takes that to whole new levels. All right, number eight. This is a really simple one. I'm gonna read you one little example of this, and then we're just gonna keep moving. No, two little examples. I can't help myself. Observation number eight: house slavery was a thing. There was a lot of it, and it was much better than outdoor labor slavery. From Pliny the Elder's Natural History, he writes Nowadays, farm work is done by feet which have been chained, by hands, which have been punished, by faces which have been branded. But the earth, which we call our mother and claim to work for, is not so stupid that we should think that she's not displeased and angry that this work is done by the labor of such slaves. Should we be surprised that we do not get the same profits from slave prisons as used to be got from the labor of Roman commanders? Truth to be told, I've got a ton of examples of ancient sources talking about the misery of farm labor, but I happen to like this example because Pliny was like, hey, this is a violation of nature. Nature is not gonna like it. It's almost like in this passage here, you can sense that Pliny the Elder is saying, This is an abomination against the created order. And watch out, the created order is going to bite back, Earth will lash back out. You can read that between the lines very easily there. Side note, Pliny the Elder got killed by Earth. He died in the eruption at Pompeii. So obviously, working out in the fields was going to be taxing and difficult. But you know what was really nasty is what Diodorus Siculus tells us about, and that was being a slave and as insult to injury, being forced to work in a mine. These men engaged in these mining operations produce unbelievably large revenues for their masters, but as a result of their underground excavations day and night, they become physical wrecks, and not like my dad, Rex Whitman, who is a saint and a gentleman, but W-R-E-C-K-S. And because of their extremely bad conditions, the mortality rate is high. They're not allowed to give up working or have a rest, but are forced by the beatings of their supervisors to stay at their places and throw away their wretched lives as a result of these horrible hardships. Some of them survive to endure their misery for a long time because of their physical stamina or sheer willpower, but because of the extent of their suffering, they prefer dying to surviving. I don't really know how much more I can add to it than that. I don't think that's what kind of slave Onesimus was. I think Onesimus had the blessing of being, like we talked about yesterday, a familial slave. Like, come on, cut him some slack. He's part of the family. Remember that excerpt? I think just being in the household is going to create a degree of trust and familiarity, whereas being a disposable body that you can just throw in a mine and work to death. The excerpts I read on mining and this kind of labor were really some of the bleakest things I came across in all of this exercise that I've done. All right. So, observation number eight: house slavery was better than working in mines. Thank goodness I was here to tell you that, right? Man, that certainly couldn't be guessed. Observation number nine is that running away was a problem, but there wasn't a unified response to it. Let me read you a few excerpts on this topic. All right. This is from another Roman digest. This is from Olpian. Here we go. Anyone who is hidden a runaway slave is guilty of theft. Are the alarm bells going off in your brain? Because I think that relates pretty heavily to what we're dealing with in Philemon and Colossians. Let me continue. The Senate has decreed that no runaways must be allowed onto country estates or be sheltered by the estate managers or agents of the landowners and has laid down a fine. But if anyone restores such runaways to their owners within 20 days or brings them before the authorities, their previous behavior is to be overlooked. Oh, weird. There's like an amnesty grace period. So you could have a runaway slave around for like 19 days, as long as you ratted them out eventually. Any person whoever who apprehends a runaway slave has an obligation to produce him in public. And the authorities are very properly required to guard them carefully to prevent them from escaping. Carefully guarding them may even include chaining them up. Isn't it interesting that it doesn't say we'll definitely include that? Huh. They are kept under guard up to the time when they can be taken before the prefect or the provincial governor. Their names and distinguishing features and the names of the persons whom they may claim as their owners should be submitted to the authorities so that the runaways can be more easily recognized and dealt with. And this also applies if details are posted up in writing in a public place or building. Now, I have a handful of these compendiums of all these different primary accounts of stuff from the ancient world. But in this particular book I have in front of me, the very next entry as a primary source from the ancient world is the full text of the letter of Philemon. And it's not hard to see why this particular author, aggregator, scholar put these two next to each other. Because the digest that I just read you of Roman law says that any person who apprehends a runaway slave has an obligation to produce them in public. Then Paul ended up with a runaway slave. He has an obligation to produce them in public. What should Paul do? He's already in trouble with the law. He's probably in a Roman prison when he encounters Onesimus. Yeah, obviously we gotta unpack that a whole bunch when we go here next episode and forward and we take what we've learned about slavery and we work through in light of Philemon and vice versa. But let me give you a little bit more about the runaway situation since it is very relevant to what we're talking about. I'm not gonna read you this one, but this is another detail from Aristotle where he has a lengthy paragraph describing the fact that even in ancient Greece there was such a thing as slave runaway insurance. He doesn't use exactly that language, but that's really what he's describing. I'm not kidding. You could take out a policy, and no doubt there would have been some sort of adjuster or what do you call it, the people who do math, uh, an actuary who would evaluate the risk maybe of given slaves who might run away or might not, and you could insure against it. I just think that's really fascinating. All right. Next up, there's a guy named Petronius who tells us about an ancient world practice that is savage for what to do for slaves who really like to run away. Uh, he proposes, um, right here. Then I shall inscribe some neat lettering on your foreheads to make it look as though you had been branded as a punishment. So the lettering will mislead the suspicions of anyone on the lookout for you. Now, interestingly, later on, and again, it's not a big enough step. I get that, but later on, in the very early days of Christianity, some Christian slave owners apparently quit doing this ancient practice of writing stuff on the forehead of runaway slaves, and instead would put a small collar on that was metal and it couldn't be removed. I know, like this is bleak, but it would have Christian symbols on there. I don't like Christian symbols being on a slave collar any more than you do. Yet in the ancient world, when people saw that, they would look at it and be like, wow, that you know, Christians are much more forgiving than normal slave owners because they don't maim their slaves to mark them. And of course, I reiterate once again how much cooler it would be if there just weren't slavery at all. But we're dealing in the reality of the time we're looking at. Last one. This is from Justinian. Justinian is kind of the last great Roman emperor, and he is way late. We're talking like 5th century. He is the last of the great ones. He doesn't even rule from Rome. I don't know if Justinian ever even made it to Rome. He ruled from Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. And his big thing was that he took all the laws from all of Roman history and he's like, we're gonna recapture the greatness of Rome. And what is the greatness of Rome? It is the strength of our clear legal code. We're gonna tap into the best of our laws and we're gonna make them just once again. We'll be a great people once again. And so Justinian's codex is like one of the great moments in legal history for the West. And in it, he says the following: At the present time, no person subject to our sovereignty may act against their slaves with excessive brutality or without having grounds recognized by the law. For in accordance with the constitution of the divine emperor Antoninus Pius, anyone who kills his own slave without cause is ordered to be punished just as severely as someone who kills another's slave. But even excessive severity on the part of the owners is restricted by a constitution of the same emperor, for when he was asked by several provincial governors about those slaves who take refuge in a temple or at the statues of emperors, he declared that when the brutality of a master appears intolerable, they be forced to sell the slaves on favorable terms so that the price should go to the owners. This was a good decision since it is in the common interest that no one should use his property badly. There is enlightened stuff and bleak stuff there in the same line. But as it pertains to running away, Justinian, who's kind of the final word in Roman law, was like, yeah, if it's bad enough, how can you blame any human for running away? And if they run to the temple of the gods or the temple of the emperor and they basically declare sanctuary, they claim sanctuary, we should hear that. And if we find that working for that master is intolerable, some kind of financial settlement should be arranged because you can't blame somebody for wanting to get out of that. And you're like, oh my gosh, that is so beautiful. And you put your hand on your heart and your eyebrows up in the middle, you're like, Justinian, you're so enlightened. And then he's like, Because misusing your tools is bad.
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, kind of felt icky at the end. I wish you'd just quit like one sentence earlier.
SPEAKER_01All right. I think I just gave you nine hard-earned, reliable, accurate observations about slavery in the ancient world from primary sources. I've got a tenth one for you here. I'm not going to read you any citations. It's just a general observation from everything else we've looked at. By the time you get to the Roman Empire, the powers that be were getting nervous. They figured out the same thing that Pharaoh figured out in the book of Exodus, that Thomas Jefferson figured out when he said slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears. It's, I mean, you have it under control, but you don't dare let go. And that, you know, people like Pliny the Elder had to say about the practice of slavery in the Roman Empire. They all figured out this isn't a great idea for the long haul. And the more we have to depend on slavery, the more that really is an indicator of the sickness of our society ethically, but also the sickness of our society economically. This won't continue to work. And there's an underlying air of nervousness about this situation and this ongoing institution that I detect gaining speed. Now nobody was really worried about it back in the Greek days, but as you get into the late Roman Republic, that's like Julius Caesar, 60 years before Jesus, and into the early empire, and then richly into the empire. Yeah, people are a little bit on edge about this, and they were right to be on edge. It proved to be a pretty big deal. Maybe one of the first canaries in the coal mine that we see historically in Roman times that should have told the story. This isn't going to work long term, is a rebellion you've heard of. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of it, but there's a guy. His name is Spartacus. There's, I don't know, some smut TV show on Showtime or something that came out 10 years ago that was about this guy, and a far more tolerable version of that story that was told back in the days of epic filmmaking with uh which Douglas is at? Kirk? Michael? Which is the old one? Kirk Douglas is the old one, right? That's the one where everybody does, I'm Spartacus, I'm Spartacus, I'm Spartacus, and they all volunteer to get crucified in the end. But there is one passing remark in our best primary source about Spartacus that I think kind of sums up all of these observations we've been talking about, and the casual assumptions that probably your average non-thinking this is just how the world is person from the ancient world would have had. These are the words of Plutarch. The first of these was Spartacus, a Thracian from a nomadic tribe who was not only very brave and physically powerful, but also more intelligent and more humane than one would expect from someone whom chance had made a slave. I mean, I opened four or five days ago with the Aristotle quote where he's like, uh, yeah, well, if how do you know somebody deserves to be a slave? Well, if they can be a slave. I mean, if they could be enslaved, then by nature they're a slave. I mean, that was one of the oldest sources that we drew on. And here we are much later on, well into Roman times, and the same assumption is in place. Yeah, it's just comical to me. Plutarch's like, yeah, Spartacus. I just don't think people were used to seeing such a clean, articulate slave. So there you go. With that, we conclude our crash course informed by primary sources on what the ancients thought about slavery, how ancient law worked with slavery, what the casual assumptions were about slaves. And with all of that in mind, I think we are so far ahead of the average conversationalist now to actually talk about what the New Testament has to say about slavery and to look at the Book of Philemon in a way that is so much better than the Book of Philemon does not meet the standards of conduct in speech section from the HR manual, paragraph seven, sentence A. Nah, apart from what we just did, I mean, that's how we're that's all we're gonna have morally to interpret or think about it. So hey, we did the work. Now let's go get the payo next week, and I think it'll be great. Thanks for being adults about all of this. Or if you're not an adult, thanks for acting like one. It's not an easy conversation to have, but we did it. We're well positioned, and we'll be on to Philemon proper next time around. I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.