What I don’t understand is how people today can talk about slavery with anything but disdain.
If it were legal for a single day it would be a disgrace.
And it doesn’t matter whether it was common or not. They buying and selling of people is just wrong.
The buying and selling of people is wrong today although it continues in some parts of the world such as parts of africa and asia
People willingly sold themselves into slavery at many times in many cultures. Greek teachers sold themselves to Roman masters to teach children for example.
Thomas Sowell’s Culture Series of three books takes a definitive look at slavery. Good to have a world wide persective rather than a limited leftist US perspective.
Slavery was a universal but not monolithic institution in the ANE, and one must understand that context of those societies, and not suppose it all fits the image we have of slavery in the antebellum South. See http://www.christian-thinktank.com/qnoslave.html and http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/w/Slavery
Working as a servant to pay off debts, or gaining income by selling ones offspring into slavery or having assurance of food and care for life and perpetuation in an age when this was a very changeable situation was a strong attraction. And freedom being given in case of severe injury by an owner (even a tooth lost) and prohibition against returning an escaped slave, as well as equal pay and forbidding threatening as ones that will be judged by God, (Eph. 6:9) worked toward superior treatment than slavery in other places, as God worked toward the ideal seen to a strong degree in in the organic NT church (Acts 2,4,5) in which there was no slavery. See post 31
Meanwhile, the “slavery” that replaced slavery has placed multitudes in bondage to a victim entitlement mentality, with its bitterness, lack of respect, theft, sexual immortality, and drugs and depression, and in which you do not merit or work for what you gain, but gain it by making noise about imagined or exaggerated injustices. Which lying drugs help you to do.