AUTHORITIES:
Wilkinson, Rosellini, Lepsius, Uhlemann, Rénan, Guttschmidt, Bugsch, Birch, De Rouget, Bunsen, etc.
In the gray twilight of history, the apparition that first distinctly presents itself is Egypt—that land of wonders, standing on the shores of the "venerable mother the Nile." The Egyptians already form a fully-elaborated, organic social structure, nay, a powerful nation, with a rich material and intellectual civilization, when as yet the commonly accepted chronology begins to write only rudimental numbers.
It is indifferent (so far as the present investigation is concerned) whether this Egyptian culture ascended or descended the Nile—whether its cradle was Meroe, Elephantis, Syene, or Thebes—or whether it first sprang up and expanded around Memphis. So, the first conquerors of Egypt may have belonged to the Shemitic or to the Aryan stock—they may have entered from Asia by the Isthmus of Suez, or by the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Red Sea, landing first on some spot in Abyssinia or Nubia; or, perhaps, the primitive civilizers of the valley of the Nile were autochthones, who were conquered by foreign invaders. However these things may have been, Egyptian civilization and culture clearly bear the impress of indigenous development.
The founders of the Egyptian civil, social and religious polity considered agriculture as the most sacred occupation of mortals—transforming the roving savage into a civilized man. It was the divine Osiris who first taught men the art of tilling the earth, if indeed he was not its inventor. But the god forged not a fetter for the farmer, and the Egyptian plough was not desecrated by the hands of a slave.
The first rays of history reveal Egypt densely covered with farms, villages, and cities, and divided into districts (noma), townships, and communes—each having its distinct deity, and each most probably self-governing, or at least self-administering: all this in the earliest epoch, previous to the first dynasties of the Pharaohs, and anterior to the division of the population into castes.
The division of a population into castes, however destructive it may be to the growth of individuality and the highest freedom in man, is neither domestic slavery nor chattelhood. These divisions and sub-divisions originally consisted simply in training the individuals to special occupations and functions, and so educating them in special ideas; but not in making any one caste the property of any other. The gradations of caste constituted no form of chattelhood whatever.
The principal castes were the princes, or Pharaohs, the priests, the soldiers, and then the merchants, artificers, farmers and shepherds; and each of these, again, had numerous subdivisions. Together they directed and carried out all the functions, pursuits, and industries necessary in a well-organized community.
In the sanctuary of the gods, and before the supreme power of the Pharaohs and the law, the priest, the military officer or nobleman, the merchant, the artisan, the daily laborer, the agriculturist, the shepherd, even the swineherd (considered the lowest and most unclean)—all were equal. They formed, so to say, circles rather independent than encompassed by each other. All castes had equal civil rights, and the same punishments were administered to the criminal irrespective of the caste to which he might belong. In brief, in the normal social structure of the Egyptians there existed no class deprived of the social and civil rights enjoyed by all others, or looked down upon as necessarily degraded or outlawed. The separation between one caste and another, moreover, was neither absolute nor impassable.
The ownership of the soil was unequally divided; but it was principally distributed between the sovereign, the priests, and the officer-soldiers. The latter were obliged, in consideration of the land held, to perform military services to the prince—a sort of enfeoffment like that which rose out of the chaos that succeeded the destruction of the Roman world.
Peasants, agriculturists, and yeomen, formed the bulk of the indigenous Egyptian population. The husbandmen either owned their homestead or rented the lands from the king, the priesthood, or the military caste; and they cultivated the generous soil either with their own hands or by hired field-laborers; but chattels or domestic slaves were unknown.
The primary cause of social convulsions and disturbances is always to be found in some great public calamity: such was the celebrated seven years' famine during the administration of Joseph, which resulted in concentrating in the hands of the Pharaohs numerous landed estates, and these principally the farms of the poorer yeomanry. But even then, no trace is to be discovered in history that any great proportion of the agricultural population were enslaved. Their condition then became similar, economically and socially, to that of the English peasantry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and even if it finally degenerated into something like the condition of the Fellahs, still it was simply political oppression, and not chattelhood. The modern Fellahs are serfs, enjoying all natural human rights of worship, family and property; and are separated by a wide gulf from the chattelism of modern slavery. If, like these Fellahs, the ancient Egyptians were forced to bow before the arbitrary power of a sovereign, they at least were not the personal property of an owner who had the power arbitrarily to dispose of them as his interest or caprice might dictate.
The population constituting the Egyptian nation, and included in this graded structure of castes, was of varied origin and descent, or, according to a common form of statement, belonged to various races. But the process of mixing the various ethnic elements with each other, went on uninterruptedly during the almost countless centuries of the historical existence of Egypt, including the epoch of its highest political development and the brightest blossom of its culture and civilization. In the remotest period of Egyptian society, the three superior castes were of a different hue of skin from the others, and some ethnologists and historians assign them a Shemitic or Japhetic (i.e., Aryan) origin. But the optimates were not white but red, and so they both considered and called themselves. All the other castes—as artists, architects, merchants, mechanics, operatives, sailors, agriculturists and shepherds—undoubtedly belonged to the African or negro stock.
Egypt teemed with an active industrial population, which furnished countless soldiers to the army during long centuries of victory. Egyptian history embraces a long period of expansion. Many centuries lay between the times of the Rhameses and of Necho, during which the Egyptians conquered Nubia, Libya, and Syria, and reached Kolchis. These armies could not be recruited—and positively were not—from chattel slaves; for succeeding chapters will show that it was domestic slavery far more than political which tore the sinews from the arms of the nations of antiquity, and rendered defenceless their states, empires and republics. If the officers of the Egyptian armies were of a red extraction, the rank and file was undoubtedly of the negro family. Herodotus says that "the Egyptians were black and had short, crisped hair," and that "the skulls of the Egyptians were by far thicker than those of the Persians—so that they could scarcely be broken by a big stone, while a Persian skull could be broken by a pebble." Such were the elements, with so many, and such varied hues of skin, or pigments mixed, which constituted the Egyptian people—which formed a society so strong and compact that, for more than forty centuries, its influence and existence constitute one of the most significant phenomena of the antique world. These hybrid elements elaborated a civilization called by modern ethnologists Cushitic or Chamitic, in contradistinction to the Shemitic and to the Japhetic4 (or Aryan.) The pre-eminent active elements in this civilization were the artists, merchants, and operatives. It was eminent for mathematical and astronomical science, for architecture, the mechanic arts, and a highly elaborated administration. And this Egyptian or Chamitic civilization, too, preceded by many centuries the Shemitic and Aryan cultures.
The origin of the denomination Chamites and Cushites has long been the subject of numerous ethnologic researches, while comparative philology, which has proved itself so potent in the solution of innumerable race-problems, has also been interrogated. The question is, by what name did the Egyptians call themselves or their land; and what meaning did they attach to such names? K-M (whence Kam, Kem, Kemi, Cham) signifies "the black land;" though, according to Champollion, it implies "the pure land;" while others give it the meaning of "the sceptre." At any rate, Cham signifies "black" in Egyptian and its ancient dialects—those of Thebes and Memphis, for instance, as also in the Coptic. Egypt proper was called by its inhabitants "the black land" on account of the appearance of its soil; it was black in contradistinction to the red land (or Descher, i.e., "desert") which surrounded the Nile valley. The Hebrews borrowed the word from the Egyptians, and transferred it from a geographic to an ethnical name—or rather, perhaps, this application was made by subsequent commentators on the Hebrew writings. Neither was the denomination Cush (Egyptian Kus, Kês-i-or, Kăs) used by the Egyptians for their own land or people. They employed it, as would appear, to denominate lands situated south of Egypt proper; for the Egyptian viceroys who administrated the government of these lands bore the title of "Si suten n Kus," or king-sons of Kush. These lands were thickly inhabited by black and brown populations. In the same way, the Hebrews (or Beni-Israel) used the denominations Cush and Cushites in a generic sense for lands and tribes situated south of them; and the term expanded with the peregrinations, forced or voluntary, of the Arabs and Jews. First it was applied to lands and tribes south of Mesopotamia (Naharaina), the birthplace of Heber (Taber) and the Beni-Israel; and when they were in Egypt, either as free or captive Hycksos, they applied the term Cush to the region of Meroe south of the Nile; and (according to Jewish writers) Sabäa, in southern Arabia, was also inhabited by sons of Cush. It would be difficult to determine to which language the word primarily belongs, but, in all probability, early Shemitic writers transmitted it to the ancient Armenians, just as they in turn transmitted it to western or Christian writers. Herodotus used it; and his Kissia is identical with that of the Hebrews and Armenians. The denomination Chute, Chuzi, Cossaia, Cussaia, of various dialects of Fore-Asia has reference to the tribes of Kuschani, Kusi, Cushites. Hence Cushites are to be found in Syria, Arabia and Africa.
In the phonetic character is found the expression M-S-R as a designation for that land. It is synonymous with the Arabic Misr, the Jewish Mizraim, Mazor, and the Syriac Mezren. Various explanations are given of this word, according to the significations it has in the various dialects. According to some it means "stronghold," while according to others, it signifies "extension;" by the Hebrews it was applied to Egypt, or, as some commentators assert, to the Egyptians.
Other appellations for the land of Egypt are found in the hieroglyphs and in phonetic groups. This is the case, for instance, with the group Nehi, signifying the sycamore, which is believed to be indigenous in Egypt.
None of these names, however, had any historical signification, so that it still remains a mystery what the native name for the primitive civilizers of the Nile valley was. As for the name Egypt, Egyptians, this was bestowed on them by the Greeks; and some attempt to deduce it from Phtha or Ptah, a divinity of the city and township of Memphis; and the denomination, Land of Ptah, is supposed to have been used in a generic sense.
The advantage of thus exploring those historical and philological labyrinths will make itself clear in succeeding chapters. Philology has explained the signification of various other ancient ethnic and national names, among others, "Hebrews," "Aryas" or "Aryans," "Pelasgi," "Greeks," "Canaanites," etc., and such explanations have frequently proved of the highest value in letting us into the secret of their origin, character, and the direction of their activity. But there is no vestige of the antique language of the Egyptians that would lead us to suppose that absolute distinctions of race, or chattelhood based thereon, formed features of the primitive life in the Nile valley.
From various paintings, inscriptions, and philological data, science has endeavored to reconstruct the ethnological conceptions entertained by the Egyptians seventeen centuries B.C. The red race occupied Egypt (chiefly lower Egypt), Arabia, and part of Babylonia; the yellow race was spread over Palestine and Syria, reaching Africa; the white race stretched north and north-west of Egypt, inhabiting a part of Libya and the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, etc.; the black and brown race occupied Egypt, Abyssinia, Nubia, and Southern Arabia. Nah es. u or Nah si. u was the name given to all negroes or blacks who were not Egyptians, while to the whole red-colored race they applied the term ret, ret-u, signifying "germ."
The Egyptian pantheon was of course the creation of the superior priests. It made each human race the creation of a separate god; and very probably all the numerous elements in the complicated social structure of the Egyptians, that is, every caste or function, even the lowest, which was still an integral part of the whole, had each its separate deity. The creator of the black race was either a god represented symbolically by a blackbird, or the god H'or (or Horos), son of Osiris, and his avenger, who dwelt in the firmament with all the other deities.
The negro physiognomy appears on the Egyptian monuments; and this not only in the representations of common persons, but even in the case of kings, as, for instance, those of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, in the statues of Totmes III. and Amenophis III. The Egyptian king Sabakos was an Ethiopian by birth, and many other Pharaohs married black African princesses—Nah es. u. There can be no doubt of intermarriages having been common, between red and black Egyptians proper; and through such unions, legal and illegal, it was that the brownish rather than entirely black color of the Egyptian man of the people, as represented on the monuments, was produced. (A similar slow but uninterrupted transition and modification may be verified at the present day and under our own eyes—crisped hair, thick skulls,5 still prevailing). Finally, eunuchs are represented of a yellowish hue, perhaps nearer in tint to that of the yellow than the black race.
Some psychologic ethnologists affirm that the African or pure negro is to be considered as constituting a passive race, requiring fecundation by an active one. If this be the case, then the Egyptians solved the question. The red and dominant race drew no impassable lines of demarcation by chattelhood; and the black population formed the most vital element of the social structure.
At the threshold of what our limited knowledge considers as positive history, therefore, we meet a highly developed society and nation, which for long centuries enjoyed a political existence, normal when compared with contemporaneous and surrounding nations, and domestic slavery neither lay at the basis of the structure, nor formed an integral element of Egyptian life. In the monuments, paintings, and inscriptions which remain as records and reminiscences of Egypt's palmy ages, no traces are found in the regular national and domestic economy, of agricultural or industrial labor which could have been performed by slaves or chattels. Slaves and slavery existed in Egypt, not as an intrinsic and integral part of society, but as an unhealthy excrescence—not under the sanction of right or law, but as the result of a violation of both. Egyptian slavery was an atonement for social and personal crime—an abnormal monstrosity, and not the normal and vital force of Egyptian activity. If slavery had been a normal social institution, it would have had its deity and its rites; but, as exclusively the result of a disease, it was regulated and dealt with as such.
Egyptian slaves consisted of prisoners of war made on the field of battle, or captives taken in forays made into neighboring or distant countries. In early times, also, all strangers whom accident or tempest threw on the shores of Egypt, and who had no claims to a legal hospitality, were enslaved; for, for centuries Egypt was closed against the intrusion of foreigners—certain merchants and traffickers only being specially excepted. Furthermore, conquered countries paid their tribute partly in children, who thus became slaves. All these slaves were the property of the Pharaohs, who employed them in various ways, distributed them to their officials, sold them to their subjects of all castes, or to domestic and foreign traffickers. But the exportation of slaves belongs to a later period—the epoch of Egypt's historical decay. Slaves were imported, but not exported, as there was no special economical slave-breeding for this or other purposes.
It is unnecessary to dwell on the generally known fact of the captivity and enslavement of the Jews, or to detail the researches concerning the Hycksos—first slaves, then masters and rulers, and finally again overpowered and reduced to captivity. But beside these Shemites, Hebrews—be they Hycksos or not—all other races and nations were at some time or other captives and slaves in Egypt. The Pharaohs warred with Asiatics, and especially with what is now called Caucasian races; and the monuments show that red, white, and yellow slaves taken in war were far more numerous than the blacks.
Egyptians condemned for any kind of criminal offence became slaves, or were condemned to public hard labor. As equality before the law prevailed in Egypt, a person belonging to the superior caste (red-skin) was liable thus to become a slave in his own country. Contrary, however, to the custom of almost the whole of antiquity, and even of earlier Christian times, the Egyptians never reduced debtors to personal slavery. A debtor was not personally responsible, and could not be sold into slavery by his creditor.
Slaves of every kind might be redeemed and manumitted. They then became equal to other Egyptians, as is evidenced by the marriage of Joseph with a daughter of a high-priest, and by his eminent official position. Children born from Egyptians and their slave women, whether red, yellow, black or white, were equal in all rights, and shared the inheritance with the legitimate offspring of the same father. The father transmitted his own status to his children, according to a custom general in the East, and ascending to the remotest antiquity.
Slaves worked in the mines, and were employed on every kind of hard labor, but principally, and as far as possible, on those great and almost indestructible public works and monuments that distinguished the cities of the Nile. It was the pride of the Pharaohs to be enabled to inscribe on the structure that the work was not performed by the hands of Egyptians—referring to the hard work, such as carrying blocks, raising and preparing material, digging canals, etc. All the servants about the palace, sanctuary and villa were slaves. They belonged to all races and colors, and as such are represented on the monuments. In ancient, independent Egypt, therefore, slavery was, in the strictest sense, limited to the household.
Such was Egypt, the most ancient of nations and civilizations. In her, slavery was an incidental and abnormal condition, and did not enter into the vitals of society during the long centuries that this society stood foremost among nations and civilizations. In the last stages of Egyptian history, however, domestic slavery did its terrible work, helped by conquests by foreigners, by the overthrow of its independence, by exactions, tributes, and all kinds of oppressions. Then only was it that political slavery, or what is called oriental despotism, became altogether fused with domestic slavery.
Various are the causes to which the decomposition and downfall of Egypt are ascribed. Some assert that Egyptian society and civilization, traversing all the stages of growth and development, logically ended in senility, decrepitude and death. Others find in the division into castes, one of the pre-eminent causes of the decline of Egypt. But, baneful and destructive as is the organization into castes, it is a blessing when compared with domestic slavery. The rigid organization of the castes was a counter-poison, a check imposed upon the extension of domestic slavery, preventing it from eating up the healthy agencies of society. The caste system—and above all priestly caste—was, to a great extent, a curb on the despotism of the Pharaohs. The castes for many centuries prevented the fusion of the two greatest social plagues: domestic and political slavery.
The all-powerful law of analogies—which in the course of these pages will be more luminously exhibited from the fate of other empires and civilizations—authorizes already the positive, and even axiomatic assertion, that the almost unparalleled by long historical life of the Egyptians, and the highly advanced state of their civilization, are due exclusively to the fact, that domestic slavery and chattelhood remained for a long time an abnormal outgrowth. It was not the basis of domestic and national economy, not the object fit for the special care of the legislator, and was not intertwined with the social, political and intellectual life of the Egyptians.
4. The term Japhetic is rather confused and unscientific. It is used here as being more popularly intelligible.
5. Herodotus.
AUTHORITIES:
The Scriptures, Ewald, Rénan, Duncker, Gessenius, Grotefend, etc.
The pro-slavery party, pacific as well as militant, has long sought to fall back on the Mosaic records for the justification of the "sacred" and "patriarchal" institution. The historic records throw a bright light on the gray dawn of Hebraic life—giving us an insight into the primitive forms of society, not only of the Hebrews, but of the other, and especially the Shemitic inhabitants of Syria and of Fore-Asia. And, truly enough, servants and slaves are found around the tent of the patriarch.
It has already been mentioned that in times long prior to any definite chronology, the regions constituting Syria, Palestine and Arabia were inhabited by various tribes—some of whom were offshoots from one stem and some from another. Of these tribes, some had already formed themselves into well-developed societies, while others, if they were not absolutely roving nomads, yet often changed their dwellings according to the exigencies of pastoral life. Palestine, the final home of the Hebrew, was, in all probability, the earliest as well as the chief highway of antiquity—especially for the Shemitic and Chamitic races, just as the Caucasus and its slopes are supposed to have been the highway for Aryan or Indo-European emigrants, and for Finnic, Altaïc, and Mongolian or yellow races. This character it had before the time when Terah, Abraham's father, drove his herds from the table-lands of Mesopotamia (Naharaina); and it preserved it under Phœnician as well as under Hebrew dominion. Repeatedly did Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians, as well as Persians, and finally Alexander and his generals, march through Palestine in their invading and conquering expeditions. The important part which Palestine played in the early commercial history of the world, also, has already been pointed out while treating of the Phœnicians.
The origin first of domestic servitude, and then of absolute chattelhood, among the primitive pastoral tribes, may be traced to two distinct sources, both of them springing from abnormal conditions and events. One source was the constant feuds and wars of the tribes; the other, individual indolence and shiftlessness. The household of a patriarch, originally composed of a family and then of a clan, soon had its share of restless as well as indolent dependents. Such hangers-on were neither as frugal nor as industrious as the patriarch's family, and so enjoyed but small consideration; generally, moreover, they were most likely strangers who, through necessity or gratitude, adhered to the house and considered themselves an integral part of it. But the patriarch had the most absolute power over all the members of the family—over his wife, his sons and daughters, and all their progeny and relations. He could banish them from the family and hearth; he could sell them away to others; he had power of life and death over them all; and such powers, of course, extended over dependents and servants. In fact, the patriarch was the supreme and only-existing law. His will, and absolute obedience thereto, was the only guarantee of order inside of the tent, and outside of it also in their relations with the tents and clans of other patriarchs. The more exclusive and distinct such a family or clan was, the more independent it was in all its relations with similar social crystallizations; and the more closely did the dependents adhere to it for support and protection.
Such was undoubtedly the origin of the domestic servitude which appears in the Scriptures with the apparition of Abraham as a distinct historical individuality. But such servants and dependents being a part of the family, were not commonly sold nor made an article of merchandise, and were not, strictly speaking, chattels, as were prisoners made in feuds or wars.7 Besides, in the formation of the primitive patriarchal household, the domestic, pastoral and agricultural labors were performed by the family—children, grandchildren, etc.; just as it is in the present day in every simple household—for a simple family formed the germ of the tribe and of the retainers around the tent of the patriarch. As the family increased, so did the herds, and so also did the duties to be performed. Meanwhile the members of the expanding family continued to attend to the household services—just as is now the case in similar circumstances—without their becoming slaves or chattels for all that. The primitive Aryan language (of which hereafter) clearly confirms what both reason and analogy assert as being an inherent fact in the constitution of every family, whatever may be the peculiarities of skin or skull, or their other ethnic characteristics. Moreover, even according to those opposed to the absolute unity of the whole human race, the Shemites descend from the same common progenitor as the Aryas (of whom are we), and this affinity strengthens what was said above concerning the similarity of their domestic life.
With the increase of the tribes and families, neighboring or scattered, increased the degeneracy of the dependents, until finally these miserable persons, grown to be an excrescence on the primitive Hebrew family life, and unable to take care of themselves, willingly accepted slavery—at times indeed craved it. The same phenomenon, under different modifications, and occasioned by various causes, again and again reappears in divers nations and empires, just as the same bodily maladies have constantly reproduced themselves throughout the countless centuries of human existence. And indeed the morale of Noah's curse can only be, that servitude, being generated by corruption of manhood, was, in its very nature, a diseased and degraded condition.
Abraham belonged to a class common to the Arabs, Hebrews, and all the Shemitic races—shieks or chiefs of warlike tribes, who were in the habit of making war against each other, carrying off prisoners, and even kidnapping on occasion. It was these victims chiefly that were the objects of traffic; and this very trait is true of the Arab tribes down to the present day.
The Hebrews, liberated from captivity in Egypt—that is, from political slavery, which must never be confounded with chattelhood—fought against their kinsmen, the Shemitic Canaanites, with a view to make themselves a home in a country already thickly settled, and in comparatively advanced culture and civilization. The Hebrews, poor, energetic, and hardened by the privations of a long captivity, bore the same relation to the nations of Canaan which they invaded, as the half-naked, half-starved barbarians of a long subsequent epoch bore to the Roman world, against which they rushed with the force of doom. The invading Israelites, according to the commands of Jahveh (Jehovah), carried on wars of extermination against the Phœnicians, Philistines, Ammonites, Amorites, Moabites, and other inhabitants of south-western Syria. Many of these original occupants and cultivators of the land of Canaan fled even to Africa, from the exterminating fury of the Jews, led by Moses, Aaron, and Joshua. Meanwhile the Jews took possession of the conquered and abandoned lands, which were divided between the tribes; and the great body of the Hebrews settled on them as agriculturists and free yeomen. In process of time, under the direction and inspiration of Jahveh, the supreme Lord of Israel, the body of commandments, regulations and ceremonials, called the Mosaic law, was framed.
The law of Moses has two prominent divisions—first, imperative commands, and second, dispensations. In respect of all absolute duties to God, as well as domestic and social duties, the law lays down its commands even to the minutest details, and rigidly condemns their violator. But, on the other hand, taking into account human frailty, and the temptations to which it is exposed, as also the exigencies and customs of life, the law is also full of dispensations. This twofold character of the Mosaic law affords its antagonists a broad field for assaults on its apparent contradictions. The law condemns idolatry, yet Aaron, the first high-priest, casts a golden calf for the people to worship, while Moses raises a brazen serpent before their eyes as a material symbol for their faith. The law commands monogamy, but permits and regulates concubinage. It prohibits licentiousness, fornication, and rape, but overlooks them in certain instances, as, for example, after a successful battle or the storming of a city, because such crimes are unavoidable when the demoniac passions are brought powerfully into play. Many other illustrations of this twofold character of the Mosaic law might be pointed out.
But minute and precise though the Mosaic record is in its religious and social commands and obligations, it nowhere commands the Hebrews, as a religious or social duty, to enslave the Canaanitish idolaters among whom they lived. Enslavement and chattelhood are nowhere laid down as special duties, nor is slavery regarded as forming the corner-stone of the Jewish social, civil, and religious structure. Slavery is not the subject of the covenant with God or of the covenant with man; neither did the possession of slaves confer any political, religious, or social rights. All this was left for the deduction of modern theology and politics.
The Mosaic law deals with slavery as with an existing evil, and regulates it as an abnormal institution. The lawgiver recalls to the memory of the Jews that they were themselves captives and bondsmen—an historic fact to which, as we have already seen, the ancestry of many of the slaveholders in the United States, at the present day, furnish a parallel.
But perhaps Biblical commentators have not drawn with sufficient severity the distinction in meaning between the Hebrew word for "servant," "attendant," etc., and that for an "absolute chattel." Chattelhood, in the modern legal and practical application of the term, was undoubtedly a rare condition in the time of the patriarchs, and even in the primitive theocratic epochs of Beni-Israel. The Hebrew language has four words to express the primitive domestic relations of the race, and neither of them will admit the meaning of positive chattelhood. Probably the oldest is the word a'buddah, which occurs in the book of Job, whose dialect is considered by modern philologists to be far older than the Mosaic scriptures; the same word is also found once only in Genesis (Gessenius Dict.). It is a collective noun, and signifies "attendants," "laborers," and, according to some exegetes, it also signifies an "estate." Such may perhaps be its meaning in the book of Job, as it occurs after the enumeration of various movables, such as flocks and herds, and may thus, in distinction, convey the idea of real property. The logical sequence in such enumerations was undoubtedly the same then as it is now—movables first in order, then landed property. Another Hebrew word for the primitive domestic servant is na'ar, but its application seems to have been rather limited; it is mostly employed to designate a "lad-servant" or "apprentice." The word most generally used, however, and the one most variously translated and explained by lexicographers is e'bed: it variously signifies "subject," "servant," "serf," "slave," "attendant," "officer," etc. Its application to a "serf" or "slave" has perhaps rather a moral or ideal than a positive legal or social sense. Thus, when in Genesis it is said that "Moses removed the swarms of flies from Pharaoh, from his servants (e'bed), and from his people," the word e'bed undoubtedly signifies "ministers," "courtiers," "officers," and "servants of the court," and not actual serfs or slaves. Common sense would surely indicate that chattels could not have been mentioned immediately after the great Pharaoh, and before his people; and still less likely is it that the oriental despotism which reduced all to political slaves was unknown in the Egypt of the early Pharaohs. Finally, the word abduh alone may signify a "slave" in the strict sense of the term; it is used by Ezra, and belongs to a period of national degradation, when both slavery and idolatry flourished in Israel.
Slavery, however, never became an integral element of Hebrew life, nor, during their centuries of glory, did its pestilence-breath endanger the national vitality. The Mosaic record, covering a period of nearly one thousand years, never mentions any slave revolt, such as so often shook the neighboring and contemporaneous Phœnicians.
For domestic slaves, the Hebrews procured foreigners, through traffic or by war; and such slaves were of the same race as the slaves of the Phœnicians and other neighboring nations. In the history of the Beni-Israel, there are long episodes containing accounts of wars, principally with tribes belonging to the same Shemitic family from which the Hebrews themselves sprang, and many of the slaves made in these wars must have belonged to the nearest cities and kingdoms. If these had been so numerous as to be employed in large bodies in agricultural labor, undoubtedly there would have been revolts during the absence of their masters on military expeditions, or even during times of peace. The absence of any such event in the history of the Hebrews, proves that domestic slavery was for many long centuries recognized only as an abnormal institution, and its growth circumscribed by jubilees and limitary statutes.
The regulations prescribing the status of slaves, and their general condition, are within, the reach of every one. Their spirit is mild and beneficent for the bond-man; the duration of his slavery is limited—his treatment is humane, and the condition not ordinarily hereditary. In the times of the early patriarchs, a servant could become the chief of the family—thus proving that some commentators have made a strange confusion in the interpretation of the above-mentioned Hebrew word (e'bed), when they construe it as applying to such a system as modern American slavery. A servant who was eligible to become the chief of a family could not be a chattel, but must necessarily have been a member of the clan, with independent powers and rights, and at least the proprietorship of himself.