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Originally posted by jefscott

Wahoo,

Here are a couple of links to look at (hope they work right):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/188576717X/qid=1081789181/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2_xs_stripbooks_i2_xgl14/104-6950198-4205568?v=glance&s=books

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Originally posted by spenlake

Victory,

Another view on Finney.

http://www.twincityfellowship.com/cic/articles/issue53.pdf

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That's exactly how Satan operates. After a person is redeemed from his slavery and brought into the Kingdom of God's dear Son, they often face a few trials. The thoughts that came to their head are, "Wow, remember when you were in the world? You had all that your flesh can indulge in. I fed you with the finest drugs, plenty of sex with just about anyone you wanted, nice material goods. Yet God won't let you have any of that. Look at you suffering for 'the gospel's sake."

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Yeah but just because there's a relativism about preferences, doesn't mean that God is truly okay with it.

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He commanded them to free their slaves after every seven years.

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Why didn't He just command them to provide for the widowed and unmarried, too?

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Wow, looked at the reviews of that book on Amazon.com. If the people who gave it only ONE star are correct (and there were more one stars than any other rating), that book is full of HORSE-HOCKEY!!! Now I can see how people could believe that American slavery is justified after reading propaganda like that and actually believing it to be FACTUAL. Sheesh!

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As a Christian, I found this monograph to be wicked. The authors' use the Bible to justify southern slavery is pure evil, regardless of how "well" individual owners may have treated their slaves. This monograph literally made me sick to my stomach but made me aware that evil disguised as Christianity is unfortunately alive and well in the US.

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The first commandment was to "love thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind and all thy strength." The second is like unto it: "Love thy neighbor as thyself" I wonder how you can claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ, love your neighbor, and make them a slave.

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Originally posted by victoryword

Interesting words from Charles G. Finney, who was one of America's most successful revivalists, soulwinner and Evangelists, and who was also a very staunch ABOLITIONIST:

Now, who can suppose, that in these days, such a man as John Newton could, even for a time, continue in the slave-trade without some compunctions of conscience? But suppose he should have no recourse to the Bible, and ask, "Were there not slaves in the days of the New Testament?" Why did not Christ denounce it? Slavery was known to the Apostles, Why did not they denounce it, if it were so wicked?

This is easily enough answered. But suppose men justify the slave-trade in this way? And in the Southern States of America this is very common. They forget that Christ had a previous question to settle before he could make any direct attack on the several sorts of sin. When Christ came into the world, instead of his mission being acknowledged, he had to debate every inch of ground. His divinity and divine mission demanded primary attention; it was necessary that the world should first recognize his authority to lay down regulations, and prohibit practices. It would have been utterly out of place for him to have attempted to set right social questions before he had established his authority to interfere with such matters. Again: it is said the Apostles did not denounce slavery. They, too, had a great question which demanded their first attention. They had to establish the fact of Christ's resurrection, divinity, and messiahship, as well as the divine authority of their own commission. This being done, they would naturally commend to the world the Scriptures of truth, and let them tell what things are right and what are wrong. Now, who does not see that it is a selfish evasion for a slaveholder to talk thus? It would have been absurd for him to have denounced any particular sins without establishing his authority to denounce sin at all.

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21:2 If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years, but in the seventh year he will go out free without paying anything. 21:3 If he came in by himself he will go out by himself; if he had a wife when he comes in, then his wife will go out with him. 21:4 If his master gave him a wife, and she bore sons or daughters, the wife and the children will belong to her master, and he will go out by himself. 21:5 But if the servant should declare, ‘I love my master, and my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ 21:6 then his master will bring him to the judges, and he will bring him to the door, or the doorposts, and his master will bore through his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.

21:7 If a man sells his daughter as a female servant, she will not go out as the men servants do. 21:8 If she does not please her master, who has desired her for himself, then he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to a foreign nation, because he has dealt deceitfully with her. 21:9 And if he designated her for his son, then he will deal with her after the manner of daughters. 21:10 If he takes another wife, he must not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marital rights. 21:11 And if he does not provide her with these three things, then she will go out free, without paying money.

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THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Sources of slaves

“Houseborn” slaves, however, enjoyed a slightly higher social status, and masters often supplied their slaves with “wives” or “husbands” in order to obtain them. An important source of slaves lay within the native population itself. At least from the 3rd dynasty of Ur in Babylonia (circa 2100 b.c.), and no doubt earlier, and from the Old Kingdom in Egypt (circa 2686-circa 2160 b.c.) self-sell or the sale of children in order to pay debts was widespread. Unlike the ordinary form of slavery, debt slavery was recognized as a social evil that should be held in check.

Many Babylonian kings, notable in the Old Babylonian period (circa 1800-1600 b.c.), issued decrees liberating debt slaves and abolishing public and private debt. The Hebrew sabbatical year (the 7th) in which Israelite debt slaves were to go free was paralleled in the Code of Hammurabi by which such persons were to be released upon completing three years work for their creditor. It is not known how far and for how long these laws were observed, though Jeremiah castigates their evasion (Jer. 34:8-17). Poor Jews were forced to sell their children into slavery to pay their taxes after returning from the Babylonian captivity (Neh. 5:1-5).


Near East – Status of Slaves

Nevertheless, a slave was not a human being before the law but a “head” like an animal. He seems to have enjoyed no protection from his master, and if he was injured by someone else, the case was considered as one of damage to his master’s property. Hebrew law provided that if a master beat his slave to death and the victim lingered on for a day or two, the master went unpunished “for the slave is his money” (Exodous 21:20-21). In the circumstances, runaways were numerous, and in Babylonia the laws of Hammurabi prescribed death for harboring a fugitive; other societies, notably among the Hebrews were more lenient. Probably most masters found that it paid to treat slaves reasonably well, and sometimes inducements were held out to them, such as the privilege of retaining small gratuities or the prospect of ultimate liberation.
Greece and Rome

The doctrine of the Roman law was summed up by Justinian in the sentence, quoted from the 2nd century lawyer Florentinus: “Slavery is an institution of the jus gentium (law of nations), whereby a man is, contrary to nature, subjected to the ownership of another.” No other legal institution is expressly admitted to be contrary to natural law, but after this formal acknowledgement of philosophical theory, the Roman lawyers formulated the practical rules governing slavery without demur.
Sources of Slaves – Greece and Rome

The sources of slaves were many and varied. In primitive Athens and Rome, insolvent debtors might be enslaved by their creditors. This was forbidden by Solon at Athens in the 6th century B.C. and in the late 4th century B.C. in Rome. But the rule probably prevailed longer in many communities. With the extension of Roman law to the whole empire, slavery for debt ceased to be legal. In Greece, children exposed and abandoned by their parents became the slaves of those who reared them. Roman law varied on this point until Justinian in the 6th century declared that all exposed infants were free. Poor parents also sometimes sold their children. This was prohibited by Roman law but was nevertheless not uncommon, especially under the later empire; the sale of newborn infants was legally recognized by Constantine the Great. A freeman might, under Roman law, allow himself to be sold into slavery and could not reclaim his freedom if he was over 20 and had received a part of the price paid for him. A few offenses were punished both in Greece and Rome by sale into slavery, and under the empire a common penalty for crimes among the lower orders was slavery in the state mines and quarries.

The principal sources of slaves, however, were war, piracy and kidnapping, breeding, and import from barbarian lands. Victors in war always possessed, and frequently exercised, the right of selling captives. With the establishment of the principate (27BC) conditions changed, however. Under Augustus there were still wars of conquest and many thousands of barbarian prisoners were enslaved, but thereafter large-scale wars were rare. Peace reigned within the empire; piracy and brigandage were effectively suppressed and, without these two major sources, slaves could be imported only from beyond the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates. In these circumstances, slaves became rarer and their price rose. Breeding in these circumstances became necessary and profitable.
Apex of Roman Slavery

Slavery reached its high-water mark in Rome in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Not only were slaves very abundant and cheap, owing to the prevalence of wars and piracy, but the Roman upper classes were immensely wealthy and were building up huge estates. The result was the introduction of agricultural slavery on a vast scale. The peasantry were progressively expropriated, and their lands either cultivated by slave gangs or converted into ranches manned by slave herdsmen. This is the only period of antiquity in which large-scale revolts occurred, in Sicily 135-132 and 104-100 BC and the rising of Spartacus in Italy in 73-71 BC, and the difficulty with which these revolts were suppressed proves the large numbers involved. Slaves were also employed on a vast scale in the mines; there are said to have been as many as 40,000 in the silver mines of New Carthage in Spain.

Social Conditions – Rome and Greece

It is obviously impossible to generalize on the condition of slaves in classical antiquity. All slaves were liable to the arbitrary cruelty of their masters; their only legal remedy was to escape to a sanctuary and demand to be sold to another master. Antoninus Pius (AD 138-161) ruled that the killing of a slave by his master was homicide, but Constantine (306-337) absolved the master if the slave died as a result of flogging. In practice there were great differences between various categories of slaves. In the mines slaves often were ruthlessly worked to death, and the chained gangs on the land were brutally treated. On the other hand, a private secretary or a nurse might be treated as one of the family, and a craftsman in charge of a workshop or a sea captain in command of a ship enjoyed de facto most of the rights of a freeman. Miners and agricultural slaves had little hope of freedom, while domestic servants could reasonably hope to be manumitted, and craftsmen and shopkeepers had a fair chance of buying their freedom.
The fact that slavery was universally accepted as a normal social institution made relations between slaves and masters easier. Slavery was regarded as a misfortune but not as a wrong, and slaves felt no resentment against their masters unless they were ill-treated.

Early Modern Plantation Slavery

Treatment of Slaves

…But the Roman Catholic clergy also tried to exert authority upon slave-owners on the spot. For example, the clergy encouraged Church marriages for slaves and opposed the separation of families. On the other hand, the Anglican clergy did not seem to show similar interests in the slaves, and in many British possessions in US States the law expressly prohibited legally binding slave marriages. But here too the situation in some cases changed under the influence of the Quakers and of certain Protestant dissidents.

A third difference came as a result of the attitude of the peoples themselves. As already noted, the Portugese and Spaniards had relatively far less race of color prejudice. Mating between white men and black women was a common phenomenon is all colonies. The rule elsewhere was that the child inherited it’s mother’s condition and consequently was born a slave. … In Brazil, where toleration toward the half-castes and even full blacks was much more in evidence, a number of free persons of African descent had reached positions of eminence even before the liberation that came in 1888; this, in turn, fostered still more the spirit of non-discrimination and had it’s effect on the condition of slaves, particularly those in direct contact with their masters. It would be excessive to say that in Anglo-Saxon territories, including the Southern United States, similar situations never occurred…
… The third [slave category] – and most numerous – included the slaves working on plantations. Here were the worst excesses, particularly if the estate was large and the absentee land owner had to rely on an agent who hired supervisors. Nonetheless, in order to maintain a balanced picture, one must always remember that published accounts usually dealt with either the best of worst examples. Probably on the whole the situation of slaves was not much worse than that of indentured laborers brought over from Europe. At times it might have been even better because the master had reason to take care of his slave who represented capital, whereas he had no similar incentive in regard to the laborer. But, of course, the condition of the slave was permanent and even hereditary, whereas an indentured man retained important rights under colonial rights and became free at the expiration of his contract.

Slave Narratives

In the 19th century, when their publication was encouraged by the abolitionists, the accounts, many of them based on oral relations, multiplied. Although some of these, such as Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), are factual autobiographies, in many cases the narratives are colored or sensationalized by the writer’s desire to arouse sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Such re-workings and interpolations are usually obvious. In some cases, such as The Autobiography of a Female Slave (1856) by Mattie Griffith, the account was entirely fictitious.

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Exodus 20:17"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's."

Exodus 20:10: "But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:"

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Exodus 21:20-21 "And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money."

Exodus 21:23-27 "… thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye's sake. And if he smite out his manservant's tooth, or his maidservant's tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth's sake."

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Exodus 21:2-11: " If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for ever. And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.

Leviticus 19:20-22: "And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free. And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, even a ram for a trespass offering. And the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering before the LORD for his sin which he hath done: and the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him."

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Genesis 16:1-2: "Now Sarai Abram's wife bare him no children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai."

Genesis 30:3-4: "And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her."

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Leviticus 25:44-46: "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly." (NIV)

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Leviticus 25:39: "And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant: But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee: And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return."

II Kings 4:1: "Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets unto Elisha, saying, Thy servant my husband is dead; and thou knowest that thy servant did fear the LORD: and the creditor is come to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen."

Exodus 22:2-3: " If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him. If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft."

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Exodus 21:16: "And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death."

Deuteronomy 24:7: "If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that thief shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you."

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Deuteronomy 21:10-14: "When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her , and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her."

Deuteronomy 20:14"But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself"

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Deuteronomy 23:15-16: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him."

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Matthew 18:25: "But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made."

Ephesians 6:5-9: "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him."

Colossians 4:1: "Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven."

1 Timothy 6:1-3 "Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort. If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;"

I Peter 2:18: "Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward."

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