and "servants of the court," and not actual serfs or slaves. Common sense would surely indicate that chattels could not have been mentioned immediately after the great Pharaoh, and before his people; and still less likely is it that the oriental despotism which reduced _all_ to political slaves was unknown in the Egypt of the early Pharaohs. Finally, the word _abduh_ alone may signify a "slave" in the strict sense of the term; it is used by Ezra, and belongs to a period of national degradation, when both slavery and idolatry flourished in Israel. Slavery, however, never became an integral element of Hebrew life, nor, during their centuries of glory, did its pestilence-breath endanger the national vitality. The Mosaic record, covering a period of nearly one thousand years, never mentions any slave revolt, such as so often shook the neighboring and contemporaneous Phoenicians. For domestic slaves, the Hebrews procured foreigners, through traffic or by war; and such slaves were of the same race as the slaves of the Phoenicians and other neighboring nations. In the history of the Beni-Israel, there are long episodes containing accounts of wars, principally with tribes belonging to the same Shemitic family from which the Hebrews themselves sprang, and many of the slaves made in these wars must have belonged to the nearest cities and kingdoms. If these had been so numerous as to be employed in large bodies in agricultural labor, undoubtedly there would have been revolts during the absence of their masters on military expeditions, or even during times of peace. The absence of any such event in the history of the Hebrews, proves that domestic slavery was for many long centuries recognized only as an abnormal institution, and its growth circumscribed by jubilees and limitary statutes. The regulations prescribing the status of slaves, and their general condition, are within, the reach of every one. Their spirit is mild and beneficent for the bond-man; the duration of his slavery is limited--his treatment is humane, and the condition not ordinarily hereditary. In the times of the early patriarchs, a servant could become the chief of the family--thus proving that some commentators have made a strange confusion in the interpretation of the above-mentioned Hebrew word (_e'bed_), when they construe it as applying to such a system as modern American slavery. A servant who was eligible to become the chief of a family could not be a chattel, but must necessarily have been a member of the clan, with independent powers and rights, and at least the proprietorship of himself.