# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 Foreword.

The un-German words "Sclav, Sclavin" [slave, female slave] do not occur in our German Bible; but the words "Knecht" [servant], Hebrew Aebed, Greek Dulos, and "Magd" [maidservant], Hebrew Amah or Schiphchah, Greek Dule, not only originally mean the same thing,*) but are also used in countless passages of Scripture in this original sense, namely in the sense of the civilly unfree or the bondsmen — that is, what we now call slaves; hence, for example, Melanchthon, in a New Testament passage cited in the previous number, renders the word Duloi outright with the word "bondsmen," and Luther too, at times, even in the Bible text itself, for the sake of greater clarity, translates the Hebrew words Aebed and Amah as "bondservant" or "bondman and bondmaid" (Gen. 47:19, 25; Lev. 25:39, 42, 44), and likewise the Hebrew word Schiphchah as "bondmaid" (Lev. 19:20). That this translation is correct, that indeed in these and other passages of Holy Scripture the words Aebed, Amah, Schiphchah, Dulos, Dule mean nothing other than such menservants and maidservants as were bondmen or slaves, is plain from the correlatives and contraries with which they are used. Thus the servants of Abraham are called those "born in his house and bought of any stranger," Gen. 14:14, 17:12; and menservants and maidservants are set over against the "free," Eph. 6:8, Gal. 4:30-31, 3:28, 1 Cor. 7:22. It is therefore manifest deception when those unversed in the original languages are given to believe that, in the passages where the New Testament speaks specifically of menservants and maidservants, hired laborers are meant — who are now also called menservants and maidservants — for which the Hebrew and Greek languages have special words, namely the Hebrew Sachir (from the root Sachar, to hire for wages), cf. Job 7:2, Lev. 19:13 (a "day-laborer"), Exod. 12:45 (a "hired man"), and the Greek Ergates, Matt. 10:10, 20:1 (a "laborer"), or Misthotos, John 10:12 (a "hired man").

What, then, do we read of this civil unfreedom or bondage in holy Scripture?

It cannot, of course, be our purpose here to give a complete presentation of everything Holy Scripture contains in reference to civil bondage. Instruction on that may be found in any good, complete biblical archaeology. It will suffice here to draw out only what the judgment of holy God himself brings to light concerning the morality or immorality of this political and economic relationship.

The first thing we read in Holy Scripture about bondage is the prophetic curse that Noah pronounces upon his one ungodly son, Ham, in which the former declares to the latter, as a divine punishment,

*) For that these words, by way of analogy, also carry other derived meanings, as do all other words, goes without saying and has nothing to do with the matter here.