Philemen, yeah,

Philemen, yeah.

Hey, my friends, it's Matt.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and today is going to be more pleasant than yesterday.

That's good. One time I was in the developing world, and I was on a bus, public transportation,

and I'd been on some buses there before, but this one was worse than the other buses I'd ever been on.

There were a lot of animals on the bus. There were a lot of smells on the bus.

There were people who weren't doing very well on the bus. It wasn't a bus you would want to be on

in a place that you would not want to be on a bus. But if you had to be on the bus, if you absolutely

had to be on that bus, you would have wanted the seat that I had,

which was the very front corner next to the permanently open bus door.

It didn't have the, it broke, I guess.

It didn't have the closing thing.

So you just got as much fresh air as you could possibly get in that otherwise stale, stagnant,

very, very stinky, terrible bus. Likewise, nobody wants to be on the ancient world slavery bus.

It's stinky. It's awful. As we discussed last time, there's going to be corporal punishment,

some beatings, probably some

occasional torture if things got crazy enough. It's not a bus that you want to be on, but if you

have to be on that bus, you would want the metaphorical seat by the door where you're in a society

that has laws that protect you as a slave, laws that incentivize manumission in a reasonable amount of time,

laws that allow for some degree of ownership, of property, of accumulation, and laws that

restrain crappy masters' darker impulses to mistreat you to even greater degrees than that which is automatically

...