2.7. Slavery in the Ancient World in General. The Attitude of Mosaic Legislation Toward It. The Establishment of Different Degrees of Servitude for Israelites and Foreigners. The Acquisition and Number of Foreign Slaves. Their Legal Status. A Comparison of the Condition of Hebrew Slaves With That of Roman Slaves

Slavery was a universal phenomenon in the pre-Christian world. This ancient world, having deviated from the norm in its development, also perverted the normal relations among people—relations that ought to have been relations of equality—and transformed them into relations of flagrant inequality, of the crushing dominion of the strong over the weak. True to its principle of soulless egoism, the ancient world was incapable of valuing the human person as a person; it regarded the individual as merely a political or economic unit and disposed of him accordingly. Hence, in all the ancient states, beneath the dominion of the few founders of those states or their descendants, countless multitudes of a rightless people languished, compelled to carry out without question the whims of the fortunate few who owned them. Such relations among the members of ancient societies were a wholesale trampling of human dignity, and, as an abnormal phenomenon, served as a brake upon the development of humanity. It is understandable, then, that the theocratic state of Moses—called to serve as a norm or, in the words of the prophet, as a light for the ancient world—was bound to proclaim and establish entirely different principles of personal relations, principles opposed to those of the ancient pagan world. Such indeed it proves to be in its essential idea, and from this standpoint it is of immense interest, presenting a majestic spectacle—a light amid profound darkness, humaneness and the highest justice amid barbaric inhumanity and injustice.

With regard to slavery, as the supreme expression of the trampling of the dignity of the human person, Mosaic legislation is truly an extraordinary fact in world history, with no parallel in the ancient world: while other legal systems placed slavery at the foundation of society and regarded a well-ordered civic and social life as inconceivable without it (the views on this point of Plato and Aristotle, expressed in their “ideal” states, are well known), Mosaic legislation alone in all the world recognized slavery as an abnormal phenomenon and took every measure to weaken and abolish it. “No religion and no legislation of antiquity,” says one scholar on this subject, “could, by its inner spirit, have so decisively opposed slavery as the religion of Jehovah and the law of Moses; and no people, on the basis of its own history, could have felt itself more called to the abolition of slavery than the people of Israel. A religion that sets so high the dignity of man as a being created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27; 5:1; Lev. 19:2), a legislation that grounds its laws upon such dignity of man (Gen. 9:6; Deut. 21:23; 25:3), and that in all its provisions has in view not only the highest justice but also tender care and protection for all who are unfortunate and in need of help, and finally a people that had itself languished under the yoke of slavery, and only through liberation from it became an independent nation—all of them were of necessity bound to strive, wherever possible, to weaken and abolish the unnatural, degrading condition of slavery.” This thought of liberation runs, as we shall see below, through the whole of Mosaic legislation and presses toward realization wherever and whenever favorable conditions present themselves. Nonetheless, this legislation did not proclaim the complete abolition of slavery. The obstacles to doing so were too great—obstacles arising both from the general spirit of the pre-Christian era and, in particular, from the Jewish people itself, which, despite its great calling, remained nonetheless a child of its time, with deeply rooted views and customs that often resisted the most elevated intentions of the lawgiver. The lawgiver was obliged to contend with such opposing elements in this case as well.

Slavery was already familiar to the Jewish people when it received its new legislation: their historical ancestors, such as Abraham (Gen. 14:14; 16:1), had many male and female slaves. And indeed throughout the surrounding world slavery was regarded as so necessary an element of social life that a people which had not yet risen in consciousness above the general consciousness of the ancient world found it difficult to break free from the former order of things and begin a new life fully grounded in the principles of equality and personal freedom. The wise lawgiver fully recognized the people’s unreadiness to accept completely the new principles proclaimed at Sinai, and therefore introduced them into the legislation only to the degree and in those forms most appropriate to the people at their then-existing stage of development. The fullest realization of the principles of equality was more feasible in relation to the actual members of the theocratic state, who had received moral freedom in the law and had become members of the “kingdom of Jehovah,” a sacred people. Therefore, with respect to them, the lawgiver proclaimed (within the bounds of what was possible for that time) the abolition of slavery. By virtue of the theocratic principle, according to which the Israelites, as members of the “kingdom of Jehovah,” are servants of Jehovah, they could no longer be servants of men, and could not be “sold as slaves are sold” (Lev. 25:42). In place of the condition of slavery, the lawgiver endeavors to establish for them the condition of free “hired servants” (Lev. 25:40). But since slavery had taken root too deeply in the social life of the people, who could not manage without slaves, the lawgiver, yielding to customs deeply ingrained in the people, permitted the existence of slavery, though in a mitigated and restricted form, and on the condition that only foreigners be slaves. “That you may have a male and female slave,” says the lawgiver, “buy male and female slaves from the nations that are around you” (Lev. 25:44). This provision was prompted by the desire to diminish as far as possible the force of an evil that necessarily existed at that time. If slavery had to exist, it must in any case exist in a form that would least contradict the fundamental principles of Mosaic legislation; accordingly, it was to consist not of members of the sacred people, who had just received both political and moral freedom and were called to proclaim that freedom to all mankind, but of those peoples who, not having received moral freedom, could not feel the deprivation of political freedom with especial acuteness. It is true that free Israelites, members of the theocratic state, could also enter into slavery, as we shall see later, but this was an exceptional phenomenon, caused by special circumstances; the main body of slaves among the Jews consisted of foreigners and their descendants. It is with an examination of the position of this class of slaves that we shall begin.

Slaves from among foreigners were acquired by various means. First of all, especially during the initial conquest of Palestine, war served as such a means: prisoners who were left alive were reduced to slavery (Num. 31:11, 31:18; Deut. 20:14). The other and, judging by the law (Lev. 25:44), the primary method of acquiring slaves was purchase, which, given the existence of slave markets in the ancient world, was the most ordinary occurrence. These slaves are designated in the law by a special term — miknath keseph — “bought with silver” (Gen. 17:23). But the most numerous slaves, especially in later times, were the so-called “born in the house,” “household members” (Gen. 17:23), acquired by the natural increase of the slaves and slave women already in one’s possession. These, in broad outline, are all the methods of acquiring slaves permitted or presupposed by the law.

It is difficult to determine, from these methods of acquiring slaves, their numbers in the Mosaic state, even though such a determination might shed considerable light on the degree of their legal standing in the state, since the more numerous the slaves, the less valuable their service, and the lower their condition, and vice versa. There is only one numerical datum, and that from the period after the Babylonian captivity, by which one can form an approximate notion of the number of slaves among the Jews. According to the testimony of 2 Esdras, among the 42,360 Israelites who returned from captivity to Jerusalem, there were 7,347 male and female slaves (2 Esd. 5:41). Consequently, if we take a Jewish household (understood as a separate house or establishment) to contain approximately six persons, there would be one slave or slave woman per household. This is a very favorable ratio for the condition of slaves. It is true that this figure dates from after the Babylonian captivity, and is therefore necessarily lower than the figure representing the number of slaves before the captivity—since the captivity inevitably entailed the ruin and impoverishment of wealthy slaveholders who might have held a considerable number of slaves, especially in view of the non-observance of the laws concerning the release of Jewish slaves within the periods prescribed by law (Jer. 34:14)—but at the same time this figure may be regarded as approximately normal, especially for the early period of the state’s existence, when the equable, moderate degree of economic well-being and the absence of large wealthy landowners did not create conditions favorable for the development of a numerous slave class, as was the case, for instance, in Greece and Rome. If this reasoning is more or less close to reality, then by the very nature of the slave’s position within the household, his legal status could not have been so degraded and wretched as to render him of no other significance than that of a unit of labor—and a negligible unit at that—as was, for example, the case with the wealthy Roman citizens who owned ten to twenty thousand slaves. On the contrary, in the Jewish household such a slave could often be an indispensable worker who, together with his master, sustained the welfare of the family, and in the event of the master’s illness might be the sole worker and provider for the family. Hence the life and health of such a slave must have been of considerable value to the master, so that the treatment and maintenance of the slave must have been incomparably better and more humane than, for example, in the case of a wealthy Roman, for whom the lives of dozens or even hundreds of slaves meant nothing. It is true that economic equality was not maintained among the Jews with mathematical precision: little by little a division emerged between the poor and the wealthy—that is, between those who could not keep slaves at all and those who could keep a significant number; but in any case the development of poverty and wealth, thanks to the wise agrarian laws of Moses, never reached the extremes seen in Rome, and the ratio described above could not therefore change with any especial sharpness, since the significance of the slave among the Jews as a valuable and necessary “worker” in the household never lost its force, and he was never regarded as a soulless instrument for the gratification of his masters’ whims. This is indicated, among other things, by the philological significance of the word ebed (from the verb abad — to work, to serve), which never bore the contemptuous character of, for example, the Roman servus or the Greek δούλος, often used as synonyms for contempt and abuse, but on the contrary frequently served as an honorific title, especially when denoting a relationship to God or a king, as for instance in such expressions as “servant of God,” “servants of the king,” and the like.

Such is the picture of the condition of slaves among the Jews as determined by the economic and social order of the Mosaic state. Even from this it is already evident how much better the condition of the Hebrew slave was than, for instance, the condition of Roman slaves, who non pro personis, sed pro rebus, immo pro nullis habebantur. But this superiority of the condition of slavery among the Jews over the condition of slavery among the Romans (in the sense of humaneness) will become even more apparent if we turn our attention to the legal, juridical position of the Hebrew slave.

A slave from among foreigners, acquired by the means described above, became by Mosaic law the full, inalienable, and permanent “property” of his master. “That you may have male and female slaves, buy male and female slaves from the nations that are around you. Also from the children of the strangers who sojourn among you, from them you may buy, and from their families who are with you, which they have begotten in your land: and they shall be your property. And you may pass them on as an inheritance to your children after you, as a possession; you shall keep them as slaves forever” (Lev. 25:45–46). To all appearances, the lawgiver here regards slaves as an economic value of the same significance to the master as any other property. This view is expressed even more precisely in another provision of the law, by which the slave is directly called his master’s “silver” (Exod. 21:21). Regarded in this way, the slave naturally fell under all the relations appropriate to property—that is, the master could sell him, bequeath him, gift him, or pledge him at his discretion, as is partly stated explicitly in the law (Lev. 25:44–46) and partly presupposed by it. Thus, judging by these provisions of the law, slaves might appear to be valued not as persons but merely as movable, animal property — non pro personis, sed pro rebus habebantur, as among the Romans. But this is only an appearance. The law does indeed regard slaves as property, as possessions, as the master’s silver, but it restricts this view to only that aspect of the slave in which he truly is the master’s “possession” or “silver”—namely, his purchase value or the benefit and profit he brings to the master. In this respect, even a free laborer might be called the silver of the one for whom he earns profit by his labor. The true nature of the slave’s legal position among the Jews will be accurately determined only when the law’s attitude toward the slave’s person is made clear. And in this respect the law takes on an entirely different character.

In the ancient world, under the universal dominance of the principle of “the absorption of the individual by the state,” a person was ordinarily valued not in himself but on account of his membership in this or that society or class within society. Something of this view is also discernible in the legislation of Moses, when he, having separated the people of Israel from all the surrounding world as a chosen, sacred people, reserved for it alone the enjoyment of those privileges attached to this status. Anyone who did not belong to this community had no claim to the privileges assigned to it. It is understandable, therefore, what a great advantage for slaves Moses’s legislation established by admitting them to membership among the “chosen people.” And this he made the primary condition of a foreigner’s entering into slavery to a Jew, by prescribing circumcision for the slave—that sign of the “eternal covenant” of Jehovah with Abraham (Gen. 17:10–14; Exod. 12:44). By admitting the slave to this high privilege reserved exclusively for members of the “chosen, sacred” people, the lawgiver thereby made clear how highly he valued the slave’s person. He evidently regarded him not simply as a soulless thing, a “movable possession,” but acknowledged in him a full human person; and by bringing him through circumcision into the community of the “chosen people,” making him, so to speak, a member of the sacred organism, he made him in a certain sense a participant in the privileges attached to that membership. Thanks to such a standing in the theocratic state, the slave acquired rights as a person. His person became inviolable. The master had no power over his life and death, and even forfeited all claim to him for maiming any of his members. “If anyone,” says the law, “strikes his male or female slave with a rod, so that the slave dies under his hand, he shall surely be punished.” “If a man strikes out the eye of his male or female slave, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free on account of his eye. And if he knocks out the tooth of his male or female slave, he shall let the slave go free on account of his tooth” (Exod. 21:20; 21:26–27). It is true that in regard to the first case the law makes a certain qualification, imposing punishment on the master only for a blow that causes swift, immediate death, and exempting him from punishment if death follows one or two days after the blow (Exod. 21:21); but in this is visible only the wisdom of the lawgiver, who takes into account all circumstances that may serve to mitigate or cancel the punishment for a crime—circumstances which in the present case may include lack of intent and extraneous unfavorable conditions that rendered a non-lethal wound lethal. Moreover, the very loss of the slave, unexpected by a master who had intended only to punish him, was already a sufficient punishment for the master, since by losing his slave he lost “his silver.” On the other hand, the law, which required the master in the event of maiming any member of a slave (“eye” and “tooth,” by the nature of figurative Eastern language, are to be understood as concrete expressions for all members in general) to release the slave to freedom, thereby significantly restricted the use of cruel punishments against slaves, so that the above-posited case of inflicting lethal blows could only have been an exceptional and rare occurrence.

Thus Mosaic legislation took the life and health of the slave under its protection. And as a person, the legislation granted the slave the enjoyment of one of the most essential privileges of members of the theocratic state—namely, the observance of the Sabbath. “The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God: you shall not do any work on it, neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male slave, nor your female slave” (Exod. 20:10), “so that your male slave and your female slave may rest as well as you” (Deut. 5:14). This sacred day of rest was therefore established not for the master alone, but also for his slave, toiling for the master in the sweat of his brow. The sabbatical year and the jubilee year likewise had the significance of rest and repose for the slave, since the agricultural labor—the principal heavy toil for slaves—ceased during them (Lev. 25:4). Finally, to elevate the moral awareness of slaves, Moses admitted them to participation both in the general festive celebrations of the people and in the private family rejoicings expressed in sacrificial meals. “And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron: this is the ordinance of the Passover: no foreigner shall eat of it. But every slave bought with money, when you have circumcised him, may eat of it” (Exod. 12:44). Similar participation of the slave is permitted at other festive celebrations, at the feasts of Weeks and of Tabernacles. “Celebrate the Feast of Weeks to the Lord your God. And you shall rejoice—you, and your son, and your daughter, and your male slave, and your female slave, and the Levite who is in your towns, and the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are among you” (Deut. 16:11). “You shall celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles seven days. And you shall rejoice in your feast—you, and your son, and your daughter, and your male slave, and your female slave,” and so on (Deut. 16:13–14). Such participation of slaves in the national and family celebrations could further draw masters and slaves together and accustom the former to regard the latter not as an inferior breed of men by nature, but as their equals in humanity, merely accidentally disadvantaged by fate—and therefore deserving not of contempt but of compassion, people in need of help and protection. Such an awareness the lawgiver endeavors to sustain in the people by frequently reminding them of the afflictions of their own condition of slavery in Egypt. Having enumerated those who had the right to participate in the festive celebrations of the people—the helpless, unfortunate, and dispossessed: slave and slave woman, widow, orphan, sojourner, and Levite who received no landed portion—the lawgiver ordinarily concludes his provision thus: “remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (Deut. 16:12), pointing thereby to a close and factual example of the severity of the enslaved, rightless, and helpless condition. And a law motivated in this way had a powerful influence in practice. In biblical literature there are several references sketching the relations between masters and slaves. Thus Job, in his afflicted condition which moved him to a sincere confession of all his former life relationships, says that he never disregarded the rights of his slaves even when they disputed with him, that he always carried within himself the awareness that slave and master are equal in human dignity. “Did not He who made me in the womb make him also?” exclaims Job, “and did not the same One fashion us in the womb?” (Job 31:13–15). What a contrast these words of Job present to the sayings of, for example, representatives of the two classical peoples—Aristotle and Juvenal. Ὁ γὰρ δοῦλος ἔμψυχον ὄργανον, τὸ δ' ὄργανον ἄψυχος δοῦλος ἐστι — says the philosopher Aristotle heartlessly, he who took upon himself the resolution of questions concerning the happiness of mankind. O demens! ita servus homo est? — echoes Juvenal, who by his satire, mercilessly scourging all that was base and shameful in Roman society, wished to exalt human dignity. What cold heartlessness and barbarism exude from the words of these “great” men, and what tenderness, love, and humanity breathe from the words of the biblical sufferer. And here is another biblical “master”—the wealthy Boaz. He does not consider it beneath him to converse with his slaves; on the contrary, he himself goes out to the field to the reapers, enters their company with truly fraternal warmth, and sincerely greets them with the affectionate words: “The Lord be with you,” to which the slaves likewise respond warmly: “The Lord bless you” (Ruth 2:4). Such friendly relations toward slaves had their place in daily domestic life as well. “If you have a slave, treat him as a brother, for you will need him as you need your own soul” (Sir. 33:32). In the absence of heirs, by the most ancient custom, a slave could become the full heir of his master’s property (Gen. 15:3), or even marry his master’s daughter, as was the case, for example, in the family of the Israelite Sheshan, whose daughter was given in marriage to his Egyptian slave (1 Chr. 2:34–35). Thanks to such a humane attitude toward slaves, there is an intelligible explanation for the circumstance that in Jewish history not a single instance of a slave revolt can be found, as occurred many times among the Romans and Greeks. Even cases of slaves fleeing from their masters—so common a phenomenon among all slave-owning peoples—appear to be very rare; at any rate, in the biblical books only one such case is mentioned, namely the flight of two slaves from the cruel and fickle Shimei (1 Kgs. 2:39). Another instance, where the cruel and wicked Nabal says in anger that “there are many servants nowadays who are breaking away from their masters” (1 Sam. 25:10), does not have genuine historical significance.

But even if a slave, unable to endure his master’s cruel treatment, fled from him, in that case the law was not on the side of the master, as was the case among all the ancient pagan peoples, but on the side of the slave. On this point the law makes the following provision, breathing full sympathy for the suffering and oppressed: “You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him; you shall not wrong him” (Deut. 23:15–16). This one provision alone could serve as a reliable protection for the slave against the cruelties of his master, since otherwise a cruel master might find himself deprived of all his slaves.

The rights of slaves from among foreigners are, however, subject to significant restrictions in comparison with the rights of Israelites.

Thus, the testimony of a slave before a court was not valid. Such a restriction was, of course, partly a consequence of the generally unfavorable opinion prevailing in antiquity regarding the moral qualities of slaves, and partly was necessitated by the slave’s coerced and dependent condition, which placed the slave—especially when called to testify against his master—in a difficult position between the demands of conscience and the threats of his master, a position in which it is hard to stand firm upon truth even for a morally strong, irreproachably honest man. The Talmudic provisions restrict the rights of slaves in certain other respects as well. Thus, a slave, as the complete property of his master, had no right to possess any property of his own: “whatever a slave acquires, he acquires for his master.” According to the interpretation of the Talmudists, the master was entitled not only to everything the slave acquired through labor, or found, or received as a gift, but also had a claim on any compensation made to the slave for insults or injuries suffered by him. But, as Salshutz notes, the Talmudic provisions in this respect were under the influence of Roman law, as is clearly indicated by the almost literal correspondence between the above-cited Talmudic definition regarding the master’s right to the slave’s acquisitions and an analogous provision of Roman law, by which: quodcunque per servum acquiritur id domino acquiritur. Under Talmudic law, the slave was likewise considered incapable of contracting a valid marriage. If a master permitted a slave to cohabit with a slave woman, such cohabitation had no character of a true marriage either in legal or in religious terms. The master could at any time assign the same slave woman to another slave for cohabitation. Children from such cohabitation belonged to the master. Children born from an illicit union of a free man with a slave woman likewise belonged to the master; conversely, children from the union of a slave with a free woman were considered, though illegitimate, to be free, so that in either case children of an illicit union followed the condition of the mother. These Talmudic provisions also strongly reflect the influence of Roman law, according to which qui nascitur sine legitimo matrimonio, matrem sequitur.

With regard to female slaves from among foreigners, the law contains no special provisions. As is evident from the statutes cited above, they enjoyed the same advantages and suffered the same restrictions in their rights as male slaves. Particular provisions arise only in matters peculiar exclusively to the female sex, as for instance in the case of seduction and an illicit union of a man with an enslaved woman. In such a case the law imposes a punishment on the guilty parties, but not death, as is prescribed for the case of such a crime committed with a free woman, but a guilt offering (Lev. 19:20–22). In view of this similarity in the position of male and female slaves, there is no need to dwell on a detailed exposition of the rights of the latter—it would merely repeat what has already been set forth; instead, let us present a general characterization of the condition of slavery among foreigners in the Jewish state.

The form of the condition of slavery that we have examined is the highest expression of “slavery” under Mosaic law. People of this condition are slaves for life. And yet, even this slavery, in comparison with slavery among other peoples, loses the character of “slavery” in the strict sense as it was understood in the ancient pagan world and is understood in more recent times. “All that one habitually associates with the word ‘slavery’ in the ancient and modern world,” says Salshutz, “namely, that people of this condition are wholly at the disposal of the master, that he may punish them without limit, burden them with incessant heavy labor, even deprive them of life with impunity—all this loses its force with respect to Mosaic law, since this class of people here stood under the protection of the law and was in no wise without rights.” Mosaic law recognized in the slave a human person and defended his rights as a person, took his life and health under its protection, admitted him to the enjoyment of all the privileges appointed for the people, and gave him the possibility, when occasion arose, to enter into a kinship relation with the master’s family—that is, to obtain independence and merge with the people. Thanks to such humane provisions, those who in other states, as a lower, rightless class of men separated from the rest of the population, formed an extremely dangerous mass that could be kept in obedience and order only by the most stringent, indeed inhumanly brutal measures (as was the case, for example, in Sparta with the helots), here entered into a patriarchal and familial union with the people. Under the influence of the free institutions of the Mosaic state, which smoothed out the sharp contrasts between the conditions of dominion and subjection, newly received slaves quickly passed from an alienated and hostile relation toward their masters into a close and fraternal one, and such an order of things could not but have the best consequences for both the civic and the family life of the Israelite people. Hence the internal tranquility of this people’s life, which knew nothing of the dreadful calamities arising from the hostility of subjugated classes toward the dominant ones. For slaves and all the oppressed, the soil of Palestine was a blessed soil, for, thanks to the law against returning a fugitive slave to his master, they found there a refuge and protection from the claims of cruel masters. Finally, even the most cheerless “perpetuity” of the slavery of foreigners among the Jews—the single feature that gives it the character of genuine slavery—is subject in Mosaic legislation to certain indirect restrictions. Thus, apart from the case noted above of the possibility of obtaining freedom through entering into a kinship relation with the master’s household, the law (Lev. 19:20) presupposes the possibility of voluntary manumission, and the laws concerning cruel treatment of slaves and the maiming of their members prescribe manumission. Particularly remarkable, as Salshutz observes, are the latter provisions: in all the cases envisaged by these provisions, the law, instead of imposing a punishment on the master for cruel treatment of the slave, prefers to grant freedom to the slave—as if thereby making clear that the lawgiver finds slavery repugnant in its very essence, and employs every means and every occasion to mitigate, restrict, or even entirely abolish the condition of slavery.

Such a character of the condition of slavery among the Jews has nothing in common with the condition of slavery among other peoples of the ancient world—among the Romans, for instance. In contrast to the legal position of slaves among the Jews as examined above, among the Romans slaves were regarded as pro nullis... pro mortuis... pro quadrupedibus; their position was even worse than that of domestic animals. They had neither voice in the state, nor name, nor tribe, nor even a census roll. They were considered incapable of being wronged in any way, and could acquire nothing for themselves, whether by purchase or by inheritance. Excepting what was called their peculium, everything they acquired belonged to their master; they could neither plead nor defend themselves in court, and were entirely excluded from the sphere of all civil rights; they were not recognized as capable of contracting marriage, and at the same time were shown no mercy in the case of an illicit union. They could be sold, transferred, pledged, like any other property; they were regarded as property, and were treated accordingly. “For the slightest and most innocent offense against their master they were subjected to cruel floggings and condemned to the heaviest labor; and the meanest tyrant, a member of the master’s household, enraged by a real or imagined insult, could at any time nail a slave to the cross and put him to the slowest, most agonizing death. Slaves were preeminently miserable captives. These wretched prisoners, as ancient history attests, were either subjected to merciless torment or sold at auction into slavery. At times they were cast into deep mines, condemned to lifelong unbearable labor in darkness and despair; at times they were shut up in private workhouses, condemned to the heaviest and most degrading labor; field work and household work, labor without rest, was laid upon slaves. Finally, the last trampling of all human dignity in the slave was the branding of his forehead with a mark of eternal dishonor and public shame. One cannot contemplate such contemptuous, cruel treatment of a fellow, kindred being without a feeling of the bitterest pity and indignation.” From this comparison of Roman slavery with Jewish slavery it is evident how much more humane and just Mosaic law is in its treatment of the dispossessed and helpless members of humanity.