Earthly Slavery and Language
CHAPTER 1 - 1.2
This chapter investigates the context of physical slavery, primarily in Paul’s day. From a contemporary view, the American experience with slavery ought not to be simplistically equated with the context of slavery in the New Testament era.1 Slavery in Paul’s day was often quite different from the picture one might imagine today. To be sure, ancient slavery and slavery in America were at times both cruel and dehumanizing. However, degrading cruelty was not always the case in ancient slavery. Nordling comments, “It is difficult for moderns to think of slavery in objective terms or to consider the idea that—in certain critical respects—ancient slavery could have been quite different from antebellum slavery in America.”2 Voluntary slavery was not uncommon in the ancient world, including among God’s people, Israel.3 This is not the image of slavery modern and postmodern readers may expect today.
Slavery is a broad subject that includes different explanations, but this chapter will focus on ancient, biblical, and linguistic topics. Slavery in context requires definitions for a proper understanding. Slavery can be described as intentional, transactional, oppressive, sometimes voluntary, and involuntary. Slavery, in one sense, is “a state of involuntary servitude.”4 Voluntary slavery is perhaps seen mainly in the Old Testament context when a slave loves and willingly stays with their master after the seventh year (e.g., Exod 21:5). The rules about Hebrew slaves are laid out specifically in Exodus (e.g., 21:1-32).
One might also become a slave as a captive or prisoner of war, as is seen frequently in the Old Testament. If not killed, captives of war were likely made subject to their captors as slaves (cf. Exod 1:8-22; Jer 25:1-14).5 In Paul’s day also, individuals and people groups were often publicly enslaved, bought and sold by captors and masters.6 But other forms of slavery were also common. Nordling writes this of ancient slavery’s perplexity and its many idiosyncratic forms:
The ancient evidence of slavery also causes a genuine perplexity at what was—already in antiquity—a complicated and baffling institution. This realization brings us to a problem which should now forthrightly be addressed: in antiquity there were so many different forms of slavery (and, correspondingly, so much potential evidence to consider: literary, papyrological, inscriptional, legal, etc.) that modern interpreters can selectively construct a “preferred view” of ancient slavery that reflects their own preexisting conceits and prejudices. Of course, none of us is free from this predicament. We would not consider Greco-Roman slavery at all, or struggle to come to terms with it accurately, were this institution not so much a part of the world within which Paul wrote his letter to Philemon—or if the correct understanding of slavery (as this institution is depicted in Scripture) were not so essential for any Christian’s faithful response to the Gospel still today.7
Ancient slavery could be a strange concept to a modern interpreter. For example, Michael Middendorf explains, “While the American experience with slavery is now a distant memory, it is still a painful one. Unfortunately, slavery is put into practice in much of the modern world. Slaves are owned and controlled by their masters unless some form of payment is made to set them free.”8 Payment for freedom from control of a master is how a slave is commonly freed, whether the slave was purchased, redeemed, or ransomed from by another. Perhaps worldly slave masters, in some circumstances, maliciously declined payment for the freedom of slaves. Then death was the only escape from worldly and material bondage. The early Christian Church, the Roman Empire, and ancient Israel were more publicly familiar with slaves being bought with a price, owing payment, and legal death as the only means of escape.9
Comprehending “slaves” and “servants” having separate and distinct status is what Paul does intentionally in Romans. For example, Paul uses δοῦλος in the first verse of Romans instead of διάκονος:10 “Paul, a [δοῦλος] slave of Christ Jesus, a called apostle having been set apart for the Good News of God” (Rom 1:1).11 The use of the word “slave” instead of “servant” for δοῦλος brings a specific way for readers of the New Testament to comprehend Paul’s philological use of slavery (cf. δοῦλος in Nehemiah 1:6,7,10,11 [cf. LXX, LSB, ESV, KJV]).12 A slave belongs to that master under that lordship. Chris L. De Wet continues, “The slave as one who has no agency outside of the volition of the master; the will of the slave is renounced and totally subservient to that of the slaveholder.”13 Subservience also distinguishes the difference in Paul’s use of δοῦλος in Romans 6 rather than διάκονος.
This study attempts to keep δοῦλος as “slave” appropriately. δοῦλος rendered slave is a proper application and hermeneutic of God’s Word in the New Testament. Middendorf notes these related terms, “Terms related to ‘slave’ (δοῦλος, e.g., 1:1; 6:6, 16–17), ‘redemption’ (ἀπολύτρωσις, 3:24; 8:23), ‘to be lord’ (κυριεύω, e.g., 6:14; 7:1), ‘set free’ (ἐλευθερόω, e.g., 6:20, 22; 8:2), and so forth come largely from the background of slavery.”14
“Unlike slavery in the American experience, race had little or nothing to do with slavery in the first century A.D.” Nordling, Philemon, Concordia Commentary, 69.
Ibid., 42.
Scriptures reveal voluntary slavery in the Exodus, “But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out as a free man,’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. Then his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him permanently” (Exod 21:5-6; cf. Exod 21:1-11; Duet 15:12-18); Cf., Preface to the English Standard Version (ESV) 2016 text edition, ix-x; cf. LSB, 2021, foreword, III.
Walter A. Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 1112.
Cf. Catherine Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Cf. Nordling, “Slavery in Ancient Society,” Philemon, 39-108. Cf. Nordling, “Theological Implications of Slavery in the New Testament,” Philemon, 109-139.
Nordling, Philemon, 42-43.
Middendorf, Romans 1–8, Concordia Commentary (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2013), 342.
Cf. Nordling, Philemon, 39-108.
In so far as retaining δοῦλος (doulos–slave, cf. Rom 1:1; 6:16, 17, 19, 20) and δουλεύω (douleuō–to be a slave, cf. Rom 6:6; 7:6, 25; 9:12; 12:11; 14:18; 16:18) instead of διάκονος (diakonos–servant of someone, helper, deacon(ess), cf. Rom 13:4; 15:8; 16:1, 27) to keep the context of slavery distinct from servanthood; BDAG, 2nd ed., renders “διάκονος ου, ὁ, ἡ. . . servant of someone . . .,” (1979), 184-85, compared to BDAG, 3rd ed., “. . . one who serves . . .,” (2000), 230; See Preface to the ESV 2016 text edition, ix-x; And for “The Terminology of Slave,” cf. LSB, 2021, foreword, III.
Middendorf, Romans 1–8, 57; Again, unless otherwise noted, all English Scripture quotations from the Epistle to the Romans are Middendorf’s translation, Romans 1-8; 9-16, (2013; 2016), which translates δοῦλος as “slave.”
“Syntactically, Paul calls himself doulos to make sense of his relationship with Christ, and also to project his authority as an emissary of Christ. The term diakonos (servant) of course also features in Paul’s writings, but more often than not, it is used to describe service to other members of the Christian community. The term doulos, in Pauline literature, was not a synonym for diakonos. Why mention this seemingly obvious distinction? Because it may appear problematic for some, perhaps more conservative, readers to consider that one of Christ’s primary appellations was that of a slave holder. It is also true that kyrios does not always mean ‘slaveholder’ in New Testament texts.” Chris L. De Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2015), 46-47.
De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 47.
Middendorf, Romans 1–8, 342.
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