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Slavery, Sexuality & Religion: Antiquity and Slavery
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Slavery was part of life in the biblical world, and slave women experienced it differently than slave men. Even ancient Israelite and early rabbinic law treated enslaved women differently from enslaved men and enslaved Israelites differently from enslaved foreigners.
The New Testament commanded slaves to obey their masters in all things. Owners sometimes coerced their enslaved women, girls, and boys into sex or made them work as prostitutes; enslaved Christians were therefore burdened with the pain of exploitation compounded by the moral dilemmas posed by the teachings of their church. Some early Christians spoke out against the sexual exploitation of enslaved persons, but their writings do not speak of punishing Christian men for sexually exploiting their slave girls or women. Christian mistresses, sometimes out of jealousy, could also treat their human property with great cruelty.
Feminist Sexual Ethics Project scholars are researching the life circumstances of enslaved women and girls and of slaveholding women in the Bible and in the early centuries of Christianity, a subject to which historians have thus far paid little attention. See bibliography on women, religion, slavery, and sexuality in antiquity.
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