Historiographies of Enslavement: The Unthought Body of the Captive in Galatians 4:1–9

Abstract

How should New Testament scholarship theorize enslavement, mainly when the victim’s experience is both linguistically unrepresentable (the very essence of pain) and, more relevantly, when primary sources do not contain first-person testimonies? Specifically, how does historiography account for the plight experienced by victims of enslavement when the historical archive is empty of the victims’ voices and, in many cases, mystifies, allegorizes, or erases the victims’ agony? I study the figure of the captive in Galatians 4:1–9 from the perspective of recent historiographical insights in the study of the Middle Passage. This article argues that the binary captive/free-person is foundational to important theological concepts in Paul, such as filiation and inheritance.

We, to a certain extent, compare slavery with death. (Ulpian)¹

Children are also included in the expression “body of slaves.” (Ulpian)²

Truly, I tell you, the heir, although he owns everything and everybody while he is a child, is not better than the enslaved. (Gal 4:1)³

Introduction

The study of enslavement figures prominently in recent New Testament scholarship. Historical and literary-oriented approaches have studied the captive’s material conditions and cultural understandings, especially over the last ten years, with a new consensus around the centrality of slavery in early Christian discourses.⁴ This scholarly trend has resulted in a new consensus whereby New Testament literature incorporates—rather than resists—Roman views on enslavement. This article subscribes to this development and analyzes the topos of enslavement in Galatians 4:1–9 with three foci: a theorization of the binary captive/free as grounding other binaries such as Jew/non-Jew and man/woman and the ensuing “ungendering” of the enslaved; a conceptualization of the captive, in the wake of Afropessimism’s contributions, as socially and ontologically dead;⁵ and a probe into how, once we situate the position of the captive as foundational, the phenomenon of enslavement and its deadly effects color essential theological topics such as inheritance, filiation, and adoption. An exploration of the defining contours of enslavement that considers recent literature on the Middle Passage and its aftermath advances, but also complicates, traditional takes on the historical and literary data. Orlando Patterson, Saidiya Hartman, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Hortense Spillers, among others, have inaugurated a historiographical ethos that complicates historical writing as they, in differing ways, question the coherence of the subject that makes history cohesive. As this ethos calls into question the seemingly predetermined cultural norms around gender, kinship, and autonomy guiding the subject’s construction, it simultaneously issues a call to write, read, and experience history in sync with the wreckage of enslavement.⁶ To arrive at the literary scene where the captive makes an appearance, one could say, is to visit a cemetery.⁷

Three factors shape what I call a “grammar of enslavement”: first, this ethos centers the binary captive/free as foundational—an underdeveloped approach when compared to similarly significant dichotomies like Jew/non-Jew, man/woman, colonizer/colonized; second, it defines enslavement as social death—versus treating the phenomenon within a continuum of oppression; and third, it treats core theological ideas as rooted in the phenomenon of enslavement—versus understanding abstract notions as unrelated to their material provenance.

Understood as an ethical hermeneutical orientation, this grammar unveils how enslavement creates a series of aporias in the argument of kinship/inheritance that work via incorporating/excluding the position of the captive. The end result, to say it with Hortense Spillers, is an “ungendering” of the flesh, the idea that enslavement transforms gendered bodies into ungendered flesh.⁸ Parsing out this game of inclusion/exclusion, I argue, undermines the inner logic of adoption that Paul’s argument—and subsequent interpreters—understands as central to his theological proposal.

Before delving into the components of a so-called “grammar of captivity,” let me specify, first, the significance of approaching the figure of the captive as a position rather than a historical figure and, second, how such positionality dispels routine uses of captivity as metaphor. Rather than studying the slave as a “status” in the ranks of Roman social hierarchy or as a literary figure that occasionally surfaces in the biblical canon, this article explores how captivity is a subject position. Enslavement, of course, constitutes a historical phenomenon that affected people by the thousands. In a slave society, however, the institution also represents a relational system—much like colonialism or kyriarchy—at the base of any human interaction.⁹ Captivity, in this sense, is a socio-political positionality within a slave society that grants Paul a rhetorical opportunity to draft a theological argument around inclusion and communal practice. An understanding of slavery as a relational dynamic and of captivity as a positionality suggests that group affiliation relies rhetorically on the topos of the captive in the sense that enslavement is “the non-relationality that structures all relationality.”¹⁰ This is a type of non-relationality that structures the archive and, consequently, clouds the interpreter’s attempt to account for a past that is both forever gone—the real lives of the captive are irretrievable—and forever present—the cultural and theological constructs based on enslavement remain with us. Understanding the structural relationship between enslaved/free-citizen requires that terms coterminous with freedom (agency, will, inheritance, etc.) not be taken as given in the historiographical enterprise.¹¹

Captivity also functions as a metaphor that transcends the historical conditions of enslavement in the service of theologies of filiation, sin, or discipleship: the child is like a slave (Gal 4:1), “we” were enslaved to elementary principles (4:3), or “you” were enslaved to no-gods (4:8). In this vein Paul calls himself a slave to the community of God (1 Cor 9:19; Gal 1:10) or uses the trope to chastise his audience for being subjected to sin (Rom 6:17–20) or to righteousness (Rom 6:18). Rhetorically, the fact that a captive’s life depends on their submission to a master, an existence under absolute conditions of power, lends itself to figurative meanings where aspects of the free citizen’s condition—passions, vices, ignorance, etc.—are chastised for their submission to external or internal, equally evil, forces. Such analogies, however, pose a series of ethical and interpretative dilemmas because they mystify the institution by sublimating its most horrifying traits: portraying oneself as servile to passions suggests a sense of subjection unlike the condition of being uprooted from one’s land—natal alienation—and being stripped of any meaningful relational ties.

Both dimensions are interrelated: captivity as a position weeds metaphoricity out by defining enslavement as a relational phenomenon within specific political forces—enslavement as social death—and, reversely, analogies skip over the defining components of enslavement. On this front, Frank B. Wilderson III adjures what he calls “the ruse of analogy” that equates different types of oppression to the ontological position of blackness.¹² Chattel slavery constitutes a holocaust of metaphysical proportions because it, unlike the Jewish Shoah or the wreck of colonization,¹³ bars the captive from any “prior plenitude,”¹⁴ reifying what Orlando Patterson explained of social death as natal alienation.¹⁵ Slavery, Jared Sexton adds, is incomparable because of the “ungeneralizability” of social death, inextricably attached to enslavement, and it does not travel.¹⁶ Although a sheer multitude of scholars contest the Afropessimist notion of “blackness as enslavement,” one does not need to adopt its philosophical assumptions wholesale to gain historiographical, hermeneutical, and ethical insights into approaching slavery as an ontological position,¹⁷ scrutinizing its rhetorical usage, and mourning its enduring legacies.¹⁸

As we peel the ruse of analogy open, critiquing the notion that enslavement has explanatory purchase outside the captive’s position, we come up against a theological argument about inheritance that circumvents the defining contours of enslavement while relying on them for coherence. The position of the slave is both required and excluded—“you are no longer a slave but a son, if a son an heir through God” (Gal 4:7)—creating a set of cultural aporias that surface when we refuse to take the “free citizen” as the normative default arrangement, a position that both Paul and subsequent interpreters take for granted. As redress, a “grammar of captivity” centers the position of the slave, distilling a series of rhetorical and ontological exclusions that a putatively inclusive “theology of inheritance” garners. The end goal is a demystification of the uttermost violence embedded in enslavement.¹⁹

In the following I address, in order, the three foci—positionality, social death, theological inheritance—first theoretically and then exegetically. Let me, however, proceed first by prefacing how a “grammar of captivity” builds on and further expands existing historiographical styles.

Historiographical Approaches to Enslavement: A “Grammar of Captivity”

New Testament studies on enslavement gravitate around three axes: historical reconstruction of the captive’s material and social conditions and the intimate links between verifiable conditions and their literary accounts;²⁰ an exploration of the symbolic use of slavery to convey religious, philosophical, and political arguments;²¹ and finally, an account of biblical arguments’ influence on the history of enslavement in the modern era.²² Such renovated interest on the topic, almost exclusively historical, should expand its scope to philosophical, phenomenological, and cultural accounts of enslavement. This expansive view permits a clarifying analysis of the dependence of significant literary and theological topics (inheritance and filiation in this case) on cultural ideas embedded in enslavement. My approach, building on historical studies of enslavement, poses that the inclusion of non-Jews in the Abrahamic covenant, or the inheritance of the covenant by Jews and non-Jews alike, relies on the symbolic gravitas of enslavement. Specifically, in Gal 4, that Paul’s theological determination of grafting non-Jews into the Abrahamic genealogy presupposes the normative position of the “free citizen” calls for an analysis of how such an assumption creates a series of contradictions.

Scholarship usually follows Paul’s steps in what I call a “grammar of freedom.” With this expression, I refer to the general hermeneutical move of assuming the free citizen as a normative position. This strategy risks portraying an inclusive, liberal, universalistic Paul, a paragon of tolerance, magnanimity, and compassion.²³ Taking Paul at face value erases the position of the enslaved, who disrupts any facile equation between freedom and discipleship, will and humanity, inheritance and filiation. As an alternative, I coin the expression “grammar of captivity” to define an analysis invested in adhering to the positionality of the captive in a given cultural system.

Subscribing to “a grammar of freedom,” in turn, inevitably risks mystifying enslavement and the plight of the captive, whereas implementing “a grammar of captivity” exposes how Paul’s theological arguments and their tendency towards abstraction obscure the captive’s position. For instance, as an advance, sonship equates to enslavement in that both conditions require tutelage (Gal 4:1–2), but both positionalities are inherently oppositional: first, the son-as-heir virtually owns the slave, and, second, the slave has no possible inheritance because as socially dead, they have no family.

The mystification of enslavement occurs both at the textual and interpretative levels.²⁴ I will be focusing on the first, but it is worth noticing that biblical interpretation has been slow in analyzing the workings of enslavement. For all the enslavement language in Gal 4, scholarship rarely refers to the institution. Recent contributions by Katherine Shaner, Mary Ann Beavis, Ronald Charles, Sam Tsang, Chris de Wet, and, most notably, Jennifer Glancy,²⁵ have examined the role of enslavement in early Christian literature by contextualizing the historical and literary evidence.²⁶ Glancy has incisively suggested how Paul’s moral elaborations, despite his calls for equality, would have impaired the full participation of the enslaved, who were expected to be sexually available to the slaveholder,²⁷ and, to our case, how the rhetoric in Gal 4 assumes the exclusion of the slave from “systems of paternity or filiation and thereby the slave’s lack of a phallus.”²⁸ A grammar of captivity presses on these types of exclusions and pushes historiographical (and theological writing) into questioning the symbolic structure that grants coherence to a narrative of inclusion/exclusion, lest we think that removing the block to integration eliminates the plight of the captive. To paraphrase Spillers, we might choose to call the captive’s connectedness “support structure,” but that is a rather different case from the moves of a dominant symbolic order pledged to maintain the supremacy of race/the “free citizen.” Or, to put it differently, a “grammar of captivity” scaffolds a hermeneutical apparatus that destabilizes the categories at hand (sonship, inheritance, freedom in this case) to visualize how they exclude and how they rely on exclusion. Dominant symbolic activity, Spillers adds,

the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.²⁹

The intellectual task on this front gets entangled with a series of epistemological, historical, and historiographical aporias: centering the captive’s position amid the archive’s erasure of such a position, assuming the enslaved’s humanity amid cultural formations shaped after their inhumanity, writing a narrative in the wake of ontological incoherence, drafting agency when the “free citizen” has defined its terms, etc. Not least important, pretending to be an author—a writer, a reader, a theorist, a philosopher, an exegete, a New Testament scholar, a theologian, etc.—theorizing enslavement as if we dwell in a world outside, beyond, or beside the institution and its legacies.

A “grammar of captivity,” without claiming to solve these aporias, theorizes “enslavement” as a condition of positionality and relationality rather than a status or an identity. Accordingly, the terms that come in contact with it may no longer be abstracted or delinked: they sit on the other side of a relationship that is grounded on the binary free/captive. The “captive” emerges as a relational element in discursive formations about “the human,” questioning the arguments that continue to center freedom. A “grammar of captivity” informs a hermeneutic invested in centering the captive versus one where the free citizen operates as the default. As they routinely follow Paul’s rhetorical movements to clarify the intricate elements of the metaphor of adoption, scholars adhere to the author’s “grammar of freedom” whereby Paul’s theological crescendo climaxes in a mythological realignment of Gen 16–21, carefully designed to incorporate non-Jews.³⁰ In contrast, my argument scrutinizes Paul’s putative gospel of freedom (Gal 4:31) by privileging the topos of the “captive,” disclosing the dependence of universalistic claims on the erasure of the enslaved, exposing the mystification of slavery for the sake of inclusion, and inviting a contemplative grieving attention in the process of building both.

New Testament studies’ focus on the historical reconstruction of the captives’ material conditions and their literary renderings has yielded crucial archival data and notable literary insights. It has slanted biblical interpretation, however, towards an exceedingly narrow focus on enslavement as social status, as an economic condition in the context of first-century imperial Rome. While some scholars have expanded the meaning of slavery to account for the wide variety of its metaphorical uses, biblical criticism would benefit from tending to the definition of enslavement, the crisis that captivity poses for the conceptualization of freedom, and the aporias it creates in cultural elaborations of what constitutes “the human.”³¹

On this front one could trace an intellectual genealogy from Orlando Patterson’s formative definition of enslavement as natal alienation to Frank B. Wilderson III’s contested understanding of Blackness/Enslavement as ontologically non-human. “Social death” understands slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”³² Patterson spotted a common denominator across slave societies and concluded that the “social non-person,” “the socially dead,” is deprived of any meaningful intersubjective connection so that they lose a proper understanding of their relationship to temporality (a reliable sense of one’s past, present, and future) and their unique orientation (an adequate sense of belonging to a land, family, and nation).³³ The captive, then, is socially dead because “the other” mediates each of their relations: the master controls the captive’s past, present, and future by determining the captive’s relations to their ancestors, their kinship, and their progeny.³⁴ Wilderson takes up the idea of social death to pose an equation between blackness and enslavement, that is, an equivalence between blackness and ontological death. Enslavement constitutes an ontological crisis in any relational system because it brackets any attempt to extrapolate and universalize the qualities of the free citizen.

The notion of the captive as socially dead, beyond its historiographical and phenomenological purchase in contemporary studies of enslavement, finds its rationale in the way Roman sources speak of the enslaved. Justinian’s etymological explanation of the servus (slave) in terms of servare (save) defines their existence as a continuation of a death that could have happened but did not: “Slaves are called thus from the fact that emperors order captives to be sold and therefore they are saved from being executed.”³⁵ Necis potestas, the ability to kill, which juridically applies to the relationships of master and slave, ruler and subject, and father and son/daughter, is only straightforward in law and in practice in the first case. Gaius is clear: “In potestate itaque sunt servi dominorum. Quae quidem potestas iuris gentium est. nam apud omnes peraeque gentes animadvertere possumus dominis in servos vitae necisque potestatem esse.”³⁶

The structural reality of enslavement in Roman culture produced many types of captives.³⁷ For instance, Stagl notices that household slaves and agricultural or industrial slaves served different purposes: “convenience and profit, respectively.”³⁸ They were treated differently in the sense that “household slaves were humanized, while slaves in agriculture and industry were treated like cattle.”³⁹ In a more direct critique of social death in the Roman context, Martin Schermaier argues that slaves could count on manumission and accumulate wealth on their own. He protests that “epigraphic and legal evidence about slaves testify to their comfortable social position. They do not seem to have experienced a ‘social death,’ or to have lived their lives as social ‘nobodies.’ ”⁴⁰ Jonathan Edmondson suggests that, in abstract, free and slave families’ lives might not be very different, but the total lack of recognition inscribed a level of precarity in the latter that is unparalleled in the free world.⁴¹ Slaves in familial relationships were subject to the same material and social conditions of abuse as their single counterparts, namely, physical violence and torture, sexual abuse, and rape,⁴² and, perhaps most notably, familial bonds could be broken up by all types of circumstances, be they legal (masters’ death or divorce), cultural (punishment for their behavior), or economical (to increase profit).⁴³ It is not the captive’s work that is made an object and exchanged but their persona: “It is not just their labor power that is commodified—as with the worker—but their very being.”⁴⁴ This is also how a historiography of enslavement turns into a historiography of pain: a way of writing history that invites lament for a human hecatomb.

At this point, it is worth stopping summarily to think with Hortense Spillers about the captive’s position in the family’s grammar. After all, as we explain in the next section, the enslaved, in Paul’s argument, belongs in the family. Hortense Spillers argues that the symbolic order in the wake of enslavement bans an attachment to one’s identity in that abstract gendered language such as “woman” and “body” occlude black women’s history.⁴⁵ Stamped by the law of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby the newborn child inherits the mother’s enslaved status, blackness/captivity deprives the mother of motherhood. Consequently, sexual differentiation “sustained elsewhere in the culture does not emerge for the African American female. . ., except indirectly as a way to reinforce through the process of birthing ‘the reproduction of the relations of production.’ ”⁴⁶ This ontological crisis splits slaves from their root gender configurations and inserts them into a new economy dominated by what Spillers terms “the flesh.”⁴⁷ A generative conceptualization for historiography, “the flesh” signals a crisis in the figurations of gender, and, consequently, it blemishes descriptive and normative visualizations of sexual difference. The flesh represents “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.”⁴⁸ Such definition posits the slave as non-human and as the condition of possibility of the human: as an ontological void where oversaturation of cultural meanings stamp on the captive body. Flesh stands for that dimension of the body excluded from basic levels of relationality. Spillers elaborates further that the “captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange. . . this open exchange of female bodies in the raw offers a kind of Ur-text to the dynamics of signification and representation that the gendered female would unravel.”⁴⁹

Scholars like Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Frank B. Wilderson III focus exclusively on the humanist crisis of the Middle Passage, and so exporting its applications to first-century texts, one might object, inevitably results in anachronism. Rather than conflating both historical periods, my argument acknowledges substantial differences (namely, the color-based racialization in the Middle Passage or the primordial role of enslavement in the rise of Western capitalism),⁵⁰ but, most relevantly, it conceives of both historical events as a continuum rather than as a break. It also suggests that such a continuum invites a historiographical reflection on the nature of sitting next to those who disappear the moment we look, as their lives are written with the ink of death. If, as Wilderson argues, slavery is, essentially, a relational dynamic, rather than a historical era or an ensemble of empirical practices (like whips and chains), then historiography should be attuned to the series of crises that the adoption of mass captivity in one historical moment poses to its respective cultural system.⁵¹ Social death, to put it in Patterson’s words, travels back and forth across time and space, inviting the critic to disentangle how the “dead” live among the living. Such a project requires that theorists of enslavement analyze the relational conditions that label the “living” as dead.

We are likely to witness the conditions of the dead among the living quite literally in funerary inscriptions where the captive makes numerous, if usually fleeting, appearances. Captives were allowed, sometimes even encouraged, to form familial ties, as in the case of conturbernia, either as an incentive or as a reward for effective work.⁵² Although they were never legally recognized and, as mentioned, always amenable to destruction, enslaved families created all types of meaningful ties. Consider the following Mérida inscription: “Dis minibus sacrum Euhodia Mellini verna annorum XV hic sita est. Sit tibe terra levis. Euhodus et Callityche filiae pientisumae.”⁵³ Mellini verna captures here the reality of Euhodia, a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, commemorated in a funerary inscription, daughter of Callityche and Euhodus and defined as property of Mellinus, the owner of the whole family.⁵⁴ Although, in this case, the enslaved family seemed to have stayed together, the point remains that their relationship was mediated through the master. In other cases, younger slaves were buried by their mother or father because one of them might have died or might have been sold or, or as we have seen, the children’s father would be the mother’s master,⁵⁵ who could treat the child as a pet or as a sexual object.⁵⁶ In a quite hyperbolic converse, sarcophagi commemorate the death of elite children by depicting caring captives (paedagogus and nutrix) tending to the cadaver “through highly affectionate contact and attitudes of uncontrolled grief” while their masters, probably the dead child’s parents, show “restraint in mourning.”⁵⁷ Although we cannot assume the emotional dispositions of the parties involved, a pattern of representation emerges whereby the captive adopts childlike, unfettered, excessive feelings. This emotional spectacle widens the ontological gap between slave and master, and it codifies in culturally sanctioned terms the enslavers’ despair for the loss of the heir.⁵⁸ When, in Gal 4:1, Paul acknowledges that the heir owns everything and everybody, he is not only referring to the material properties but to every enslaved person in the household, their relationships, and even their emotions. No wonder then that scholars categorize enslavement as “antikinship.”⁵⁹

The Captive’s Positionality: Enslaved/Free-Citizen as an Ontological Structure

Slavery in New Testament scholarship focuses prominently on the captive’s agency or lack thereof. Since the material, archaeological, and literary evidence obfuscates the captive’s existence, intellectual pursuit strives to expose the mechanics of silencing and retrieve the captive’s voice. However, centering the slave’s agency already frames the problem in terms of what the captive has been made to lack: has not the captive’s subjectivity been shaped by enslavement from its inception? A captive—whether born into enslavement, sold, kidnapped, etc.—is violently inserted into an institution of death.⁶⁰ A “grammar of captivity” renders the retrieval approach insufficient because it postulates a question within a “grammar of freedom.” Adhering to a “grammar of captivity” shifts the question from evaluating the slave’s performance and visibility—where they are explicitly mentioned or how they are assumed to exist—to an awareness of where and how the captive “is left to die” and how cultural practices reify what natal alienation has initiated—where they are absent every time relationality is mentioned and how such mention deepens social death.⁶¹ The conceptualization of captivity as a (non)relational institution tasks the scholar with the ethical challenge of accounting for lives existing beyond intelligibility.

The question of the captive’s positionality surfaces prominently in the domestic codes. As these texts address wives and husbands (Eph 5:22–33), children and fathers/mothers (Eph 6:1–3), they address the captive as a captive (Eph 6:5–9).⁶² In the next section, we will expand on the process of ungendering, a rhetorical event that occurs due to the positionality of the captive. The flattening of the captive’s subjectivity happens at two intertwined levels: first, at the level of identity, the captive is excluded from the father/mother-husband/wife-son/daughter position; second, as a consequence, at the level of action, the identitarian exclusion manifests at the level of address since it cannot possibly abide by the rules provided to the “family” (implicitly identified as constituted by the free citizen): the “slave wife” is not under the authority of the “slave husband” (5:22), the captive “husband” cannot possibly be the head of the captive “wife” (5:23), give himself to her as Christ gave himself for the church (5:25) or love her as he loves his body (5:28). Ultimately, the man who “goes away from his father and mother and [is] joined to his wife” (5:31) or the child capable of obeying father/mother (6:1) and honoring them (6:2) can only be free citizens.

We encounter a similar, if more subtle, dynamic in Gal 4:1–9, wherein the slave is banned from the sonship position. Of course, absolute precarity is the condition of the captive within the family: because the family is essentially relational, the slave cannot occupy any of the positions. Father/mother, daughter/son, and sister/brother are empty signifiers because the slave is liable to be stripped of them at the whim of the master. The captive cannot truly be a son because he does not have a father/mother and he is owned by the heir himself. Although statements such as “you are no longer a slave but a son” do not preclude sonship (ἱοθεσία) from being inclusive,⁶³ they do not apply equally across gender and freedom status: free women are a constitutive part of the family, while slaves (“men” and “women,” “wives” and “husbands,” etc.) are precluded from occupying any stable position in the family grammar. Consequently, although I agree that the adoption metaphor, gendered as it is, “makes sense exclusively for Gentiles,” one may only claim inclusivity if the gender axis overrides the freedom status.⁶⁴

The universalizing potency of Paul’s argument relies on the figure of adoption, a concept of non-Jew inclusion that depends upon the slave/free-citizen binary. Although scholarship has been highly productive in addressing the Jew/non-Jew dichotomy, the slave/free-citizen positions remain undertheorized. The goal remains “not to be entangled again with the yoke of enslavement” (Gal 5:1).⁶⁵ Paul then maps the Jew/non-Jew divide onto the slave/free metaphor, with scholarship tending to the first and obviating the latter.⁶⁶ The partial equation of the non-Jew with the slave conflates an ontological difference of positions because the non-Jew starts off as a son that “owns everything and everybody” (Gal 4:1).

How does the captive’s position work in this case? Paul establishes here a clear dichotomy between a child (νήπιός) and a slave (δούλου) (4:1). The main difference between both is that the first is lord of all (κύριος), whereas the enslaved serve as administrators and keepers. When the time comes (4:2), the inheritance passes over to the son. The metaphor is rich and dense: in a family, the (free) child is destined to become the master (κύριος), but in the meantime, while under supervision, he is like a slave (δούλοs). The grammar of enslavement precludes the slave from being “a son” or “an heir” from being “son as heir” (4:1). The metaphor sanctions cultural notions that associate the captive with childhood and exclude him from inheritance. As the slave has no access to inheritance, he is perpetually a child. The slave, as guardian of the male heir, is also kept from the wealth/inheritance. The father, a free man, oversees appointing the heir. The slave, however, cannot be considered a son (he is not the inheritor) or a father (he has no inheritance to provide). The rhetoric of enslavement precludes the slave from occupying the structural roles of “child” and “father.” The slave is childish but not a son, a guardian but not a father. The slave, banned from the structural positions of father/mother, husband/wife, son/daughter, inhabits a fraught place in the domestic economy: it grounds the structures of wealth while being banned from them.

A “grammar of captivity” does not claim that “slaves” cannot be “heirs” of the covenant (clearly for Paul this is the case; Gal 3:28), but it does signal how the metaphor builds on the positionality of the captive, simultaneously drawing on the position of the slave and excluding it once the free citizen appears as the normative position:⁶⁷ the structures of kinship, the laws of inheritance, and the dynamics of adoption apply to the free zone. And since these notions retain theological influence—as we will see in the last section—they produce a theology from and for the free citizen. The gospel of freedom excludes the slave, and such exclusion is masqueraded as inclusion of the non-Jew.

The recent shift to the Jewish Paul has expanded the scholarly debate from granular concerns about the nature of “faith,” “justification,” or “salvation” to considerations about ethnicity. This shift has yielded a counter-narrative to the still pervasive view of a universalizing apostle. Instead, locating Paul within Judaism plants him amid various processes of ethnicization in antiquity. For instance, Carolyn Johnson-Hodge, in a brilliant study of filiation, argues that Gal 4 realigns non-Jews’ alienation from God by resorting to a corporative view of fictive kinship. Through Christ’s heritage as the heir of Abraham, the non-Jews become affiliated with Israel: “in keeping with the ideology of patrilineal descent, these new descendants are understood to have been included in the lineage from the beginning, as part of their ancestor’s seed.”⁶⁸ A “grammar of captivity” examines the potential hierarchies among these dichotomies (male/female; Jew/non-Jew; free/slave) and argues that enslavement creates a series of conceptual crises: the slave complicates the male/female, father/mother, father/son distinctions. For instance, in Gal 4:1, the captive status bars the slave from being a “son” and therefore an heir, while posing the son—always a free citizen—as the owner of the slave (κύριος πάντων ὤν; 4:2). The father (4:2), necessarily a free citizen, determines the fate of inheritance. The sons, equally placed in the free position, in addition, are required to decide what only free citizens can choose (4:9). Although, the Jew/non-Jew split drives the theological deliberation, the captive/free-citizen binary grounds the argumentative pull.

To walk around the positionality of the captive cannot be exclusively an exercise in logics. It invites historiography into a delicate ethical/rhetorical task of accounting for the textures of biblical narratives to honor, mourn, hear, and be horrified at the traces of a discourse predicated on the negation of the captive’s dignity. The “non-person” hides in the historical archive. In Paul, with rare exceptions (Philemon, for instance), the slave is a symbolic condition, an allegorical qualifier attached to concepts like “flesh,” “sin,” or “will” rather than an actual literary or historical character. The slave, one could say, is “the unthought,” a condition of possibility for reflection, not only hidden but forced to do so because they have been stripped of their agency. Hartman notices that the enslaved appears as “a display of the violated body. . . an inventory of property, a medical treatise of gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.”⁶⁹ In other words, the slave is in lieu of something else, a placeholder “to make a point,” be it a prop to draft an argument about non-Jew inclusion (as in the passage at hand) or to support an assorted set of politics, tacit or apologetic, of reading scripture (as in the scholarship on the passage). This arrangement is further compounded in Paul’s letters because the captive is buried in overriding discourses around inclusion: Jews/non-Jews, men/women, leaders/followers, etc. The Jew/non-Jew divide—seemingly on par with the binary male/female—has overtaken the taxonomy of free/captive.

Social Death and Ungendering

The slave is barred from the basic kinship structures, occupying an ontological position of death. One might argue that the free/slave gap is gradual: the captive cannot be father/mother “in a certain sense,” or the free citizen can be enslaved in certain circumstances. However, death—as in social death—inscribed in captivity separates enslavement from any other type of oppression, turning enslavement into an exceptional condition, distinct from other cruelties resulting from capitalism, colonialism, or patriarchy.⁷⁰ These are the deceits of a ruse of analogy. On this front, Wilderson steps up Patterson’s analysis to consider how enslavement is the corollary of a protracted process of racialization, culminating in an ontological void.

Wilderson, for our purposes, puts on the table the historiographical question of how to talk about life—collectively speaking, the captives share this condition—mediated through the master’s absolute terms: the captives may be high in the social echelons or may be exercising their own will as they monitor other slaves on the state-farms, but no aspect of their existence—their social relations, family, ancestors, descendants, connection to the native land, etc.—can be credited to them.⁷¹ Violence and oppression can mark everyone experientially, but they mark the captive ontologically: for all intents and purposes, the basic conditions that make their life human could end the next minute.

Grounded in this volatility of the sine qua non of human life, of the fungibility of every possible connection with the world of the living, affixing kinship categories to the slave’s condition is a misnomer. It is certainly ironic that Paul uses the condition of the ontologically disinherited to advance his arguments on inheritance. It is ironic but highly effective: believers in Christ acquire a new inheritance because they are not like the disinherited/captive. If the task of centering the captive’s position brackets our inertia to apply kinship categories indiscriminately, we face the interpretative challenge of rehearsing the entanglements of dispossession with basic societal configurations. How are we to conceptualize the position of the captive amid absolute dis-inheritance? Are the son and the slave ever really similar (Gal 4:1.7)? Does an understanding of the family—essential for the metaphor of inheritance—remain unscathed by centering the captive’s position? Ultimately, how does a “grammar of captivity” inform a grammar of the family?

Enslavement generates an ontological shift and provokes a definitional crisis in the category of “woman” and, by extension, in the gendering process.⁷² The socio-political order of the New World, “with its human sequence written in blood,” “marked a theft of the body” from its will and desire.⁷³ Hortense Spillers suggests that the category of woman/mother—and by extension man/father—does not apply to the captive: on the one hand, the enslaved mother is ungendered because social death mediates her reproductive function, and, on the other, she is over-gendered because her womb becomes the condition of possibility for property relations.⁷⁴ Lacking a subject position, the captured sexuality provides a physical and biological expression of “otherness.”

The captive father also contributes to the ungendering of the mother because it places her out of the traditional symbolics of gender—the captive father is banished, and the captor as a father is a mocking presence: “a dual fatherhood is set in motion, comprised of the African father’s banished name and body and the captor father’s mocking presence.”⁷⁵ Slaves are not women because the commodification of the flesh renders them equal to males, but they are mothers because they perpetuate the flesh. Ultimately, as Jennifer Morgan argues, “woman” and “motherhood” should not function as a natural category in light of “both the overwhelming commodification of the bodies of infants and their mothers, and the potential impulse women may have felt to interrupt such obscene calculations.”⁷⁶ The primordial role of property relations erases the fundamental kinship structures because the offspring does not belong to the mother/father.⁷⁷ Motherhood never comes to fruition because it is always mediated by social death: kinship in the service of commodification and property. As Hartman elaborates, “the reproduction of human property and the social relations of racial slavery were predicated upon the belly. Plainly put, subjection was anchored in Black women’s reproductive capacities.”⁷⁸

The appropriation of the slaves’ reproductive capacity and the entitlement to disrupt, own, and manage the primary mother-child bond is but one of the foundational practices of social death. Enslavement, one could say, understands the womb as a stretching device and seeks to flex it relentlessly without breaking it. In this structure, where does the captive’s son stand? In Paul’s argument, “son/heir” (Gal 4:1), “father” (4:2), and “mother” (4:4) are structurally free citizens since inheritance can only occur through freedom. Where are we to find traces of the captive’s life? The enslaved includes here any configuration of kinship (mother/father/son/daughter, etc.), and as such they make a phantasmagoric attendance because their presence is conjured up through allusion, but it is impossible to glean where their fungible bodies will end up. As John 8:35 so pithily puts it, “the enslaved does not remain in the house forever, but the son does.”⁷⁹

I am suggesting that evacuation of the captive from the structures of the “human” demands extreme care with the vocabulary and grammar that the interpreter uses to account for their position. Occupying/receiving the place of sonship (υἱοθεσίαν; Gal 4:5) describes a positionality that excludes the position of the slave: “you are no longer a slave, but a son” (4:7), only then can you be inserted into inheritance (4:7). “Slaves” cannot be “sons,” (also in 4:4 the son is not a slave), and a “woman/mother” cannot be a slave; otherwise, inheritance would fail.⁸⁰ Ultimately, what does it mean for “economies of power, property, kinship, race, and sexuality” to engender?⁸¹ Hartman concludes that “woman” is an unfit category because it is always subordinated to the law of property.⁸² The same applies to sonship, fatherhood, and motherhood because punishment, trauma, and injury equate dispossession and impede subjectivity. The slave in 4:1 refers indistinctively to any part of the kinship structure with deleterious effects for the slave: to be owned (4:1) is to be disinherited (raped, kidnapped, sold, bought, etc.).⁸³

Calls for restituting the slave’s relationality remain tainted in the structures of enslavement. Varro, after recommending against having too many captives from the same nation to avoid conflict, suggests that foremen be made more productive by allowing them to keep an allowance (peculium) and a “connection” (coniunctas)—“out of which they have children”—so that they develop a stronger “connection” (coniunctiores) to the property (fundo).⁸⁴ Instrumentality defines “family” connections, and enslavement blurs the categories that define the family itself,⁸⁵ enfleshing in antiquity what Hortense Spillers calls “being for the captor.”⁸⁶ This definitional crisis signals an ethics of interpretation at ease with incoherence and fragmentation: since enslavement voids a cultural system’s cohesiveness, then our readings of such a system should sit on the brink of legibility. Scholarly logic cannot be produced at the expense of forcing the captive’s position back into liberal, enlightened, or autonomous notions of will or including it along the terms of binaries like Jew/non-Jew, man/woman.⁸⁷

Theological Enslavements

Arguments of a theological nature resort to the phenomenon of enslavement for rhetorical purposes. Conversely, we also encounter certain legitimizations of enslavement based on a divine order. Philo, for instance, justifies the enslavement of Esau to Jacob because “God declares that one is a ruler and leader and master, but that Esau is a subject and a slave.”⁸⁸ Hebrews, he further adds, were slaves to the Egyptians who, in turn, were enslaved by the Pharaoh because “they are prone to a degenerate life and quickly sink to every slavery of the vices.”⁸⁹ In the third century, Origen harps on the story of Ham to legitimatize the enslavement of Canaan in the Hebrew Bible.⁹⁰

Paul’s letters weave together theological considerations on belonging, freedom, filiation, and communal belonging with slavery motifs. For example, in Gal 2:4, Paul warns his audience about the danger of infiltrated “false brothers” seeking to steal our freedom “so they make slaves of us” (καταδουλώσωνται).⁹¹ The metaphorical use of the captive topos for theological arguments relies, as we have seen, on a mischaracterization of enslavement itself: the analogy works on a vision of captivity as obedience and subjection when, in fact, it is social death as natal alienation and disinheritance. Ultimately, remaining free and not going back to enslavement (5:1) relies on a type of resolution inapplicable, by definition, to the enslaved.

Enslavement moves from being a political institution—the master owns the slave—to a theological condition—the slave is subjected to the “worthless elementary principles of the world” (πτωχὰ στοιχεῖα; 4.9). In the first case, the slave embodies disinheritance, in the second, a resolve to enter into heritage. In the process, the definitional aspects of enslavement, its constitutive elements—and those that initially made the metaphor work—disappear, creating the illusion that enslavement is temporal and not ontological. The mystification of enslavement via theology leaves the captive in a “camera obscura,” unreachable through certain metaphorical renderings. A “grammar of captivity” as a theoretical proposal that poses the enslaved on the other side of freedom summons the interpreter to disavow facile associations between the slave and subjection, theological inheritance and ontological disinheritance. As the slave becomes the template for a theological telos—be it an exemplar for moral decay (4:3), redemption (4:5), or adoption (4:6)—the theological task, I suggest, consists of stripping these attempts of their obscuring dynamics.

How do we then grasp the ferocity of inexpressible pain without being sidelined by pre-existing metanarratives of teleological (and theological) hope and redemption? More to the point, how do we account for the plight of the captive before their condition becomes translated into theological claims? The void, the yell, the squeal refuse explanation, recovery, and interpretation. Death opposes pristine exegesis. Ultimately, in encountering the lives of the dead, we should come to experience incompleteness, unrecognizability, disengagement.⁹² At Hartman’s behest, history calls us to interrogate the ethics of empathy; the historian coming to terms with a fraught task steers their eyes beyond textual and literary evidence, “to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”⁹³ What scholarly resources will aid us in addressing the unthought, the ineffable, as we mourn an irretrievable pain that invites us to undo ourselves? This is a history of lament, not as in mourning with others or sympathizing with their despair, but instead of facing with horror a past/present sealed with death. As historians and cultural critics, we are summoned to write lines seeded with terror. Rather than excavating the material conditions, the economic underpinnings, the cultural wreckages of enslavement, the task remains to experience a grief stemming from the impossibility of having a relationship with the socially dead.