Slavery, marriage and the Holy See

Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History, 2012

Phoenix, 1993

Stephen Hodkinson and Dick Geary (eds.), Slaves, Cults and Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012)

American Journal of Islam and Society

Kecia Ali has already acquired a reputation as one of the most important English-language scholars of Islam and gender of her generation. Her latest book will do nothing to detract from that reputation, and may well solidify her asthe leading scholar of her generation of Islam and gender in the United States.While the title suggests that its contents exhibit a parallel concernwith slavery and marriage, the work is really devoted to showing how theformally separate legal institutions of marriage and slave holding shapedand were shaped by each institution ‒ with their respective doctrines attimes converging, and while at other times, the doctrines diverged. Thebook consists of an introduction, five substantial chapters, and a conclusion.The chapters cover the formation of a marriage and its similarities toand distinctions from concubinage, the only other legal relationship thatmade sexual relations licit. The second chapter treats the interdependencyof claims within marriage, while po...

Eleutheria, 2013

This paper looks at the church's handling of the issue of slavery in the period before Constantine and the official recognition of Christianity. The time period is important because Christians had no political authority to end slavery, assuming they wanted to do so. Thus, the aim of the paper is discover how the Church as an institution alleviated the conditions of the slaves and how slaves were treated in the church and examine the relationship of slave to master in the church. This will be accomplished by examining certain doctrines of the faith church leaders applied to these problems as well as ancient understandings of what Paul had written and how it fit into their world and social context, which was the social context of the Bible itself. More specifically, by examining Paul's letter to Philemon, Ignatius' Epistle to Polycarp, and the Didache, the paper argues that the early church, using a Scriptural model, worked within its circumstances to ameliorate slaves' material conditions, to bring all classes of people to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and to ensure that, within the church, all people were treated as equals.

Women in the Ancient Near East, 2016

In our discussion on the second wife (Chapter 5) we saw that a slave-girl could be introduced into a childless marriage as a second wife. According to the terminology of Old Babylonian laws for marriage contracts, in contracts formulated to favour the first wife, she became, the 'wife' of the man and the 'slave-girl' of his wife. Legally it is absurd to use 'the wife' to express the relationship between this second wife and the man, for he was as much her master as her husband. This had led R. Westbrook, usurping a term from psychiatry, to suggest that this woman is a 'split personality', leading to a conflict between 'property law' and 'family law'. Surely the children would not later inherit their own mother as a slave!1

The Journal of Legal History, 2019

Rabbinic legal texts often pair converts with freed slaves. This association has been explained by the notion that, like converts, freed slaves joined Judaism upon manumission; therefore, freed men and women were legally viewed like converts. I suggest an inverse and more complex dynamic, through which Roman laws and concepts regarding freed persons influenced particular elements of rabbinic halakhah concerning converts, especially female converts. Since Roman freedwomen were new citizens with certain marital limitations, which have been attributed to lacking pedigree and an assumed sexual history (during servitude), their legal status offered a useful prism for considering female converts, who also had matrimonial restrictions and were without lineage. Moreover, given that a freedwoman's prior enslavement had implications for her sexual background, female converts were viewed through that same lens. So, even though female converts may have come from non-Jewish families that considered their daughters' virginity an important asset, the rabbinic legal linkage of freed slaves and converts affected several halakhot concerning female converts and their status in marriage, irrespective of their actual sexual history. Yet certain non-legal rabbinic teachings distinguish between these two female cohorts, resembling the differentiation between freedwomen and freeborn females that characterized the Roman world. For the entire article see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01440365.2019.1625216 (If you want a PDF of the full printed article and do not have access, please write: [email protected])

Journal of Roman Studies, 1989

Hebrew Slavery> the Enslavement of Female Sexuality, 2019

Concubinage was a Hebrew custom, one that may have originated through social constructs of slavery as seen in Hammurabi’s Babylon where young girls were purchased for the dual purpose of serving as handmaids to mistresses and as concubines for masters. The nature of marriage, in whatever form it took, was not circumscribed by sexual exclusivity even within the household. This paper will consider the focus on concubinage both within and outside of legal parameters of slavery within Hebrew society. These laws are strongly manifested within the Bible/Old Testament and underwrite why this was such a common use of young women in early Hebrew society. The group involved were wealthy Hebrews, which much of the Covenant Code focuses on, at a time when there were vast differences in wealth between the rich and classes below them. This paper will advance the idea that during this period the enslavement of female sexuality occurred or was increasingly popularised whereby women and young girls became objects of male use within traditional Near Eastern households.