“All nations of the ancient world, including Israel, enslaved those they defeated in combat and took the women as sex slaves.”.........
Didn’t the American Indians do this as well?
I did say all nations.
To be fair, it depended on the level of “civilization.” Hunter-gatherer types had little economic use for slaves. They generally killed all the males or adopted them into the tribe. However, men can always use another women, and so women were enslaved or married (a distinction without much difference in many tribes).
That is, I think, a somewhat important fact it’s hard for us to grasp. For many women down through history, being enslaved after their men lost a was just didn’t change things that much for them. They were already slaves in many ways in all but name.
An interesting exception to the hunter-gatherer rule was in the Pacific NW, where the land was so productive they were able to develop a sophisticated society with slavery and human sacrifice despite no agriculture. The Haida and Tlingit of Alaska raided as far as California for slaves.
As societies moved up the ladder to chiefdoms and then states, slavery became, AFAIK, universal.
Yes. And, although legal, socially-accepted sex slavery died out wherever Christianity spread, it persisted in societies where slavery still existed and concubinage had some sort of legal sanction, and until very recently, slavery or slave-like conditions, were a normal part of the fabric of every society since the development of agriculture. America and the countries of Latin America (including Brazil which also imported African slaves and didn’t get around to abolishing slavery until 1888, but somehow gets no guff about it from the left the way America does) had the misfortune of being the last new societies to arise before the most of mankind finally decided that the ownership of other human beings was unconscionable.
Sure, in much of Christendom, full on slavery had been replaced with serfdom a long time before, but it was basically in the 19th century that all that, both slavery and serfdom, came to an end, even in the Ottoman Empire, though the Muslim countries that arose when it broke up, Turkey and Syria, excepted, backslid and (on paper at least) only reabolished slavery in the 20th century — Ethiopia and a few bits of Hindu and Buddhist Asia only getting around to abolishing it in 20th century, as well.