Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
1 Peter 2:18-25, Household slaves and a harsh master
Peter tells household slaves to submit to their masters, the harsh as well as the kind, because suffering unjustly while doing good is commendable before God. Christ suffered for them, leaving an example: insulted, he did not insult in return, and by his wounds they have been healed.
1 Peter 2:18-25, in every translation this tool compares.
Peter speaks directly to household slaves, telling them to submit to their masters, cruel ones included, and saying that patient endurance of unjust suffering pleases God. He grounds this in Christ, who suffered without returning insult or threat and left them an example to follow. Drawing on Isaiah's picture of the suffering servant, Peter says Christ carried their sins in his body so that they could be healed and brought back like strayed sheep to their shepherd.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/household-codes\/","n":"Household codes","s":"From Aristotle on, moral writers told the male head of a household how to rule his wife, his children and his slaves, in that order. Religions under suspicion used the same form to show Rome they were no threat to the family.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/honor-and-shame\/","n":"Honor before a crowd","s":"Public standing was the currency of the ancient Mediterranean. People competed for honor and dreaded being shamed in front of others.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/shepherd-and-sheep\/","n":"Shepherd and sheep","s":"Scripture pictured Israel without a leader as sheep without a shepherd, and promised that God himself would come to shepherd them.","r":""}
Peter speaks to slaves in households, whose economic and social prospects were frequently better than those of free peasants; field slaves were worse off, and slaves in the mines would never hear the letter (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). The cultural backgrounds articles on slavery add the harsher side: slaves could be beaten, sold away from family and tortured for testimony, and "slaveholders sometimes freed them in midlife to avoid caring for them in old age." Wright's commentary adds sexual abuse. Peter does not address the institution itself; no ancient slave war had ever succeeded and abolition was virtually impossible, but his sympathy is plainly with the slave, whom he sets beside the suffering Christ (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). Speaking to slaves at all was unusual: "relatively few writers cared to even provide advice directly to slaves" (the article on Ephesians 6). In a culture of honor an insult was answered with an insult, an option slaves did not have (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). The passage runs through Isaiah 53; Carson, Moo and Morris report Selwyn's view that 2:20-25 carries an eyewitness's memories of the passion, and Diaspora Jews called God the Overseer (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes).
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, introduction to 1 Peter 2:18-25, and on 1 Peter 2:18-20, 2:21, 2:22, 2:23, 2:24 and 2:25
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on 1 Peter 2:18-25, 2:19, 2:20, 2:21, 2:23 and 2:25
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, articles Slaves and Slaveholders in Ephesians 6 and Ancient Slavery and the Background for Philemon
- D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament, ch. 19, Peter, Author
- N. T. Wright, Early Christian Letters for Everyone, comment on 1 Peter 2:18-25
