Let us now turn to another aspect of culture that is harder to trace than the existence of democratic institutions, the question of whether people valued freedom. Recent study has identified three kinds of freedom that might be valued: personal, sover-eignal, and civic (Patterson 1991: 1-5). Personal freedom may be summarized as the freedom of movement; most modern definitions of freedom focus on that aspect, and the Akkadian word sometimes translated as ‘‘freedom,’’ andurarum, derives from a verb meaning ‘‘to move freely, to run off.’’ This meaning also appears to apply to the Egyptian word for ‘‘freedom,’’ wstn, which at base meant ‘‘to move freely.’’ Indeed the Greek term most usually used for ‘‘freedom,’’ eleutheria, may be related to a form of the verb erkhomai, meaning ‘‘to come or go’’ (Snell 2001: 21-9). By sovereignal freedom one means the freedom to make decisions about one’s life without the interference of others; rulers in the ancient world were the persons most clearly endowed with this power, of course, but some interpreters see this as a central characteristic of men in democratic Greek states. Civic freedom is the power to participate in governmental deliberations and decisions. In most polities in the ancient world this freedom was more assumed than asserted, though there was considerable variety in different times and places about how widely this freedom was shared.
While believers in the Greek miracle may stress how cunningly the aspects of freedom combined at Athens, they will readily admit that Greek city-states were societies dominated by slavery, and the leisure the free had was provided by the labor of others who had legally no freedom at all. A key question is whether in preGreek times elites from whom we have written evidence valued freedom as an important element in their understanding of what it meant to be human. It has been argued that Greeks’ valuing of freedom derived from their observation of the treatment of women captured by Greeks and led away into slavery. The empathy that arose for the women in such situations may have developed into a broader appreciation of the qualities of freedom at least for free men (Patterson 1991: 47-132). It is clear that the empathy with enslaved women was an important aspect of Greek drama at least of the playwright Euripides (480-406 bce), and perhaps of Greek thought after him. From the Ancient Near East, nonetheless, one can see that even in archival records of the flight of unfree laborers there is a demonstration that the common people resisted the dictates of the elites by flight and so valued their freedom. But the elites did not obviously empathize with them in their plight, and the record of the flight was for accounting purposes only (Snell 2001: 46-62).
There is nonetheless clear evidence that elites did value freedom in some senses as seen in royal edicts especially from the Old Babylonian period (2004-1595 bce). In that time we have many references to kings’ ‘‘setting freedom’’ for various groups, but we have only two actual decrees that may be the records of such acts. These edicts may be an extension of Early Dynastic references to kings’ canceling obligations for groups of citizens (Snell 2001: 64). The edicts themselves appear to have tried to state moral precepts of a general nature but also to abrogate specific kinds of loans and taxes, presumably for a limited period and probably for a limited population. They were the reflection of kings’ economic policies and were decreed when conditions became noticeably difficult for the poor. Their implementation and effect are not well understood, but there were references to them in archival texts, indicating that scribes were concerned with how and when they would be imposed (Charpin 1990). In the more extensive of the edicts the king made clear that he wanted to free persons who had been enslaved as guarantees for loans, but he did not intend that other slaves should be free (Finkelstein 1969: 528 paragraphs 20-1).
Somewhat later in the Hittite Kingdom in what is now Turkey a king declared that he freed the citizens of a part of Syria he had conquered from their previous obligations to bring taxes and to do forced labor (Neu 1996: 11-12). Also from North Syria there is a literary text that shows that the gods had been unhappy because the rich people of the city of Ebla had not seen fit to make a debt release (Snell 2001: 68-9).
In almost every period of Ancient Near Eastern history there are references to royal decrees and releases from debt, indicating that such efforts at an economic policy were carried out with varying success and also that the elites were aware of them and their possible implications. Such decrees were anti-reformist in that they did not address causes of economic hardship or try to change basic institutions. They merely set the clock back on the taxes and loans owed by the poor (Charpin 1990).
Did the Mesopotamians value freedom in the same ways that Greeks appear to have valued their understanding of freedom? Of this we cannot be sure since Mesopotamians did not in general write discursive essays about anything, but I believe we can say that the kings were not operating in a vacuum of public opinion and in fact were appealing to it.
In the legal collections from the Ancient Near East also we see kings boasting, like Ur-Nammu (2050 bce), ‘‘I freed the Akkadians and foreigners (?) in the lands of Sumer and Akkad’’ (Roth 1995: 15-16). Slaves themselves, however, were treated fairly harshly within the codes, though it is interesting that slaves actually escaping were to be punished only in the Hittite Laws from around 1200 bce, while the harborers who facilitated the runaways’ progress were more consistently condemned (Snell 2001: 85).
In literary texts the reaction to freedom and to flight may have been more sympathetic. In a Neo-Assyrian incantation collection from around 700 bce, a passage indicates that freedom was cherished as a value by the people who composed the text:
Who estranged companion from companion,
Who did not free a captive, did not release a man in bonds,
Who did not let the prisoner see the light,
Who said to the captive: ‘‘Leave him captive!’’ to the man in bonds: ‘‘Bind him tighter!’’
He does not know what is a crime against god, he does not know what is a sin against the goddess. (Reiner 1958: 13)
The god could be any great god, and lording one’s freedom over another and not releasing the prisoner was seen here as a grave crime. But it was the sort of crime that courts would have difficulty proving, and so it remained in the realm of moral instruction.
There is one society of the Ancient Near East where the valuing of freedom seems even more palpable, at least in the literary form in which we can study it, and that is Ancient Israel. The emphasis of the Biblical texts on getting out from Egypt ‘‘from the house of bondage’’ and the relative slavery that that entailed is clear in many periods. It has been argued that the liberation from slavery was not liberation in the later Greek sense but a liberation for service to God. This seems to be a misreading of texts similar to Exodus 10: 26, which commands people to go forth in order to serve God. But the service of God was not to be like the service of men; it involved freedom of movement in that the people were expected to leave the land of Egypt (Snell 2001: 119-20).
It is also clear that within the history of Israel there was a continuing strain of distrust for human authority figures, especially kings. This may derive from the fact that almost all the sources for the Biblical texts were not closely associated with kings, unlike much of the literature in the rest of the Ancient Near East. We thus hear the voice probably not of the common person but of a literate elite very protective of its prerogatives as critics of the regime. The Book of Judges in particular, though clearly crafted long after the events that established a separate monarchy in Israel, seethes with ambivalence about kingship, and the most pious judge refused to be king because in his view God should continue to be king (Judges 8: 22-3). Practically this meant that the judge favored the older, less intrusive ways of governing.
It is in the legal material in Deuteronomy where one hears most persistently of the importance of remembering that we were ‘‘slaves in Egypt,’’ and therefore must consistently treat the downtrodden and poor and foreign in our midst with kindness and sympathy (Deuteronomy 16: 12, 24: 18). Such admonitions appear as motive clauses to various kinds of stipulations, and motive clauses were not the oldest part of the legal tradition and appeared to proliferate over time (Sonsino 1980: 221).
The culmination of this line of thinking was Deuteronomy 23: 15-16 (Hebrew 16-17), which may be a reaction to the Ancient Near Eastern treaties which called for the return of fugitives. Such treaties might be taken as evidence that some elites did not value freedom. Deuteronomy itself has been recognized in modern scholarship as having the outline of an Ancient Near Eastern treaty, and so the inclusion of the opposite of what was expected in such treaties may be an indication of the condemnation by some Israelite intellectuals for the customs of other Ancient Near Eastern cultures (Weinfeld 1992: 169-70). The Deuteronomy passage may have come from north Israelite intellectuals who escaped to the southern kingdom of Judah after the fall of their state in 722 bce. But obviously it must have found some support in the south too, or it would not have been copied into and passed down along with the other early writings. It reads:
Do not give up a slave to his masters who saves himself from his masters to you. With you he shall live in your midst in the place which he shall choose in one of your gates in a place that seems good to him; do not oppress him.
This passage was understood in traditional Jewish interpretation as referring to an Israelite slave who had escaped from a foreign master back to the land of Israel. The Israelite was to take him in and allow him to live where he wished in the community of Israel. This understanding undermines the revolutionary nature of the statement and tames it for future slave-holding ages. But that is not what the passage says, and Biblical literalists have seen it as a sanction for any slave wishing to escape any kind of slave-holding (Snell 2001: 129-30).
The Deuteronomy passage is probably the most radical assertion of the value of freedom in the Hebrew Bible, but there are others that indicate a similar feeling. Exodus 21: 16 says, ‘‘Whoever steals a man, whether he sells him or is found in possession of him, shall be put to death.’’ This stipulation would not outlaw enslavement for debt, but it would ban child-snatching. Leviticus 25: 39-41 further mandated a limited slavery at least for Israelite slaves that ended with the jubilee year of remission of debts and restoration of land. The slavery of a limited seven-year term for Israelites enslaved by Israelites was also preached in Exodus 21: 2-6 and the parallel Deuteronomy 15: 12-14.
In addition to the legal passages there is a story that indicates that the religious people thought such restrictions on slave-owning and such freeing of slaves ought to have been a regular thing in Israel. Jeremiah 34: 8-17 argues that the liberation was supposed to be periodic but in fact had never been carried out until the state ofJudah was threatened with destruction by the Babylonians in 597 bce. The slave-owners consented to a freeing of the slaves apparently to placate religious opinion, but they then recaptured their freed slaves, and the prophet saw this as rebellion against God’s will. After the return from exile the Jewish governor Nehemiah in the fourth century BCE tried to stop the debt slavery that had become rampant among Israelites (Nehemiah 5: 1-13). The persistence of slavery in such circumstances as in most later societies was to be expected, but any reader can see that there were strong and persistent strands within the Biblical tradition that valued what can be clearly categorized as personal freedom.
World History
