Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/59

Rh, to return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for servants and for handmaids. Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto Me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.”

Neither the Greek nor the Roman had any scruple in reducing one of his own countrymen to that permanent bondage which alone can be properly called slavery. In the early times both of Athens and Rome, we find numbers of the poor reduced to slavery by the rich. And in the wars between Grecian states, whole communities when vanquished are swept into hopeless and irredeemable bondage by the people of their own race. Greece must have swarmed with Greek slaves after the Peloponnesian war.

Foreign slaves the Hebrew was permitted to hold. “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over