PLMN050 - Ancient Expectations on What You're Obligated to do if You Find a Runaway Slave

The Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast

Matt Whitman

Education, Reading, Morning, Bible, Christianity, History, Prayer, Devotion, Scripture, Study, Faith, Men's, Women's, Plan, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Philemon You might like to get some copies of The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible for yourself and for others - here's a link that gets TMBH a little kickback: https://amzn.to/4pEYSS9 Thanks to everyone who supports TMBH at patreon.com/thetmbhpodcast You're the reason we can all do this together! Discuss the episode here Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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0:00.0	Right on the front end today, I want to say thanks to everybody who supports this program.
0:04.0	This thing happens because of you, and I'm ridiculously grateful.
0:23.1	Well, well, well, if it isn't our last day talking about big observations about slavery from the ancient world based on the few hundred ancient sources I went and read.
0:36.2	I'm ready to be done with this part. I don't like
0:38.5	slavery very much, but like I was saying at the end of our last conversation, dang, I've learned a
0:42.8	lot. I feel like I'd get it a lot better than I used to. We're talking about Philemon.
0:47.1	Philemon is a book that has a slavery question right at the heart of the issue. What happens when
0:53.2	you crash? One of this bleakest expressions of the darkness of the issue. What happens when you crash one of this bleakest expressions
0:56.2	of the darkness of sinful humanity right up against the gospel of Christ? What's going to win?
1:03.0	What's going to happen? That's what in part Philemon is about. I think more than anything,
1:08.6	it's about reconciliation in light of the gospel, but you can't
1:11.8	avoid the slavery question. And boy, oh boy, have we ever not avoided it in our conversations?
1:17.7	Let me quickly recap what the observations we've made so far are, and then we're going to get
1:21.7	the last ones in. Number one, slavery in the ancient world was not racist, it was classist.
1:27.0	Number two, there were a lot of ways to become slaves.
1:30.2	Number three, people back then thought slaves were morally incompetent, yet conflictingly, held them to high expectations of their moral behavior.
1:39.5	Number four, nicely, people back then didn't really think slaves were evil, per se, just simple and less and morally
1:47.9	incompetent, and they believed in many cases slavery could be a mercy and better than other
1:53.7	alternatives. Number five, manumission was real. It happened a lot. There were many
2:00.1	pathways to it. It was idealized and it
2:02.9	was considered noble. Number six, the physical punishment of slaves, sometimes even gruesomely,
2:10.1	was a thing in the ancient world. But number seven, it was frowned upon. There were all kinds
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