In case you missed the first part of this post please check it out before reading this one.

“Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, no by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.  Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.  For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.  Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” – Colossians 3: 22 – 4:1

Even after yesterdays post I still cringe a little when I read those verses.  I’m sure it will wear off over time. Well I wanted to pick up where I left off yesterday.

In the ancient Near East, education of slaves was seen as smart business practice.  Slaves were educated by their masters, most times they were to a point that they were smarter than and more educated than their owners. Let me give you two examples of where this plays out in the Bible itself. Joseph was a slave who ended up being second in power only to Pharaoh in Egypt. Daniel was a slave who ended up second in power to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. These were slaves who were so educated and so trained and so smart in how they did things that there was an acknowledgment among their owners that, ‘this is an extremely gifted individual. Let’s let him rise all the way up to the top if they can.’  This was not the case colonial America as we all well know. There is no black man who is a congressman in the 1700’s, in fact, we’re late into the 1900’s before that occurs.  In the ancient Near East, it’s not uncommon to see a slave rise to an unbelievable amount of power to be able to own land himself and even have slaves that work for him. You had the ability to save your own money, purchase yourself out from slavery and then run the business with the slaves that you had purchased, which you are educating.  Because persons owned slaves across a range of economic levels, they developed no conscious awareness of being a class or a group of people. So in colonial America, they are black men and women. There are elements of Chinese men and women who were enslaved in those early centuries of American history, but primarily they were black men and black women who were dressed similarly, they began to develop their own culture, they began to develop their own class and they began to recognize that, “We are an oppressed people.” Like Israel in Egypt, they began to sense the heavy hand of their master as a group. That is not nearly the case in the ancient Near East, because you could be a millionaire and have a slave as your neighbor living in a house nicer than your own and not even be able to tell by how they dressed, where they lived, how they walked or how they talked that they were a slave.  In deep contrast to New World slavery, ancient owners did not regard their adult slaves paternalistically. You’ll find littered through our shameful history this idea that the black man and woman are so ignorant that the white master, would need to parent them, “lest they destroy themselves”, and some of even Christianity’s brightest minds bought into this nonsense.

Within the ancient world it was not uncommon for an indebted person to sell himself or herself into slavery to pay debt or to avoid poverty. So on the socioeconomic scale, the slave was not the bottom level, the day laborer was.  The slave could be the prince of Persia; or he could be sitting on a throne next to Nebuchadnezzar.  The slave might be working at the left hand of Caesar himself, whereas the day laborer is forced every day to try to find something to do to make money to feed his family. So that bottom rung would often offer themselves up to slavery in the hopes that they might be educated, trained and then released in the year of Jubilee. Or if they owed debts, they would offer up themselves to work off those debts. They were not kidnapped from another land and forced into labor. They sold themselves into slavery to cover debt or to learn a trade and make a better life for them. No African did that.

No African said to themselves, ‘I’d like to try to survive a long six weeks at sea in the hopes that I would be forced into an ungodly amount of labor until I died. I would like that as opposed to running free in the beautiful, Africa.’ I don’t know that there is any historical record of an African going, ‘I’ll take slavery in the New World.’

In the end there is a large historical difference between American Colonial slavery and Near Eastern slavery (especially of the Semitic cultures in the Bible).  When you address this subject please do so historically and not by lumping differing cultures and context together.  I know I can not stop some of you from just being bitter against the Bible but the fact is on this subject there is a difference.

For further information on this subject check out a sermon preached at a church called Redeemer Fellowship (click here for the link).

“Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, no by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.  Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.  For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.  Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” – Colossians 3: 22 – 4:1

Can we just be honest for a minute?  When I first read this passage I immediately had flash backs to when, as a child, I read or heard about slavery in America.  How verses like this and many others were used to suppress the freedoms of a whole people groups.  I used to become angry when I knew that people took this out of context and it quickly sent me to find the historical context and I was very surprised by what I found.  So this week I wanted to focus on the historical aspect of the idea of slavery in the Scriptures.

Today I wanted to compare and contrast two different ideas of slavery. For you and I, our idea of slavery is built around European colonialism.  What we think of when we think of slavery is the Africans being abducted or traded for, in Africa and then brought over to work the cotton fields where they were mistreated and oppressed and beaten. That is our framework for slavery. It is accurate. But historically, the British were the last ones to get involved in the slave trade, it was deplorable to them. The first historical record of the British being involved in the slave trade was actually an act of piracy in 1540.  A man hijacked a slave ship and, instead of setting the slaves free, he sailed it to the Caribbean and sold the slaves, as a result Queen Elizabeth was furious.  From this point there is a progression of events.  The British overthrow Spain and Portugal in the Caribbean.  As a result the British take over the all the sugar cane fields.  At the time the English are so opposed to the slave trade that they send the Irish down to work the fields. Now what’s the problem with a bunch of Irish people working the fields in the Caribbean?  Over a period of about 100 years, England learns that the

Irish could not do the work there because of climate, temperatures and the rigors of working the fields. So slowly but surely, they begin to utilize and use the Africans for their sugar. Now it’s important to know that really at no point does slavery really take root in England. It’s always distant from them so it quickly became easy to justify it because you don’t see the horrors of it. Contrary to popular notions the slave trade was not built on cotton; it was built on sugar. Now when it comes to the colonization of the New World, what we now know as the United States of America, specifically in the South you have both cotton and tobacco. Furthermore, the British had learned in the Caribbean is that the Africans were legitimate workers. So they began to really build up the “New World” with slaves.

So the differences between colonial slavery and what the Scriptures are speaking to when they address slaves. And I acknowledge out of the gate that the Bible is clear that one human being can own another human being but there are some pieces that help us process this and watch the line of redemption.  An enslaved person in the Bible could not be identified by clothing, ethnicity or socioeconomic background, whereas in colonial America, the slaves [simply] were Africans, or those of African decent.  If you saw a black in South Carolina in the 1600’s, he wasn’t in business he was a slave. An certain ethnic group marked colonial slavery which is substantially different than “slavery” that was extant in the ancient Near East. Literally, anybody could be a slave.  Within the near east the cultural and religious traditions of slaves were usually that of their masters or owners, in other words they were integrated into society. Juxed opposed to the slavery that we are familiar with in which the Africans, until the gospel really began to penetrate and move through the U.S., had a completely different religious cultural structure than their white owners. They had a completely different way of living, a completely different way of eating (i.e. Soul Food), and a completely different way of interacting with God.  They were just completely different, that was not the case in the ancient world.

Well before this gets completely out of hand I need to stop for today but I really hope that this is helpful so far and I look forward to continuing the post tomorrow (click here for next post)…..