It was perhaps from his Egyptian father-in-law that Solomon, to his own cost, learnt the secret of forced labour which alone rendered such undertakings possible. In their Egyptian bondage the forefathers of Israel had been fatally familiar with the ugly word _Mas_, the labour wrung from them by hard task-masters.[245] In the reign of Solomon it once more became only too common on the lips of the burdened people.[246] Four classes were subject to it. 1. The lightest labour was required from the native freeborn Israelites (_ezrach_). They were not regarded as bondsmen (עֲבָדִים), yet 30,000 of these were required in relays of 10,000 to work, one month in every three, in the forest of Lebanon.[247] 2. There were the strangers, or resident aliens (_Gerim_), such as the Phœnicians and Giblites, who were Hiram's subjects and worked for pay. 3. There were three classes of slaves--those taken in war, or sold for debt, or home-born. 4. Lowest and most wretched of all, there were the vassal Canaanites (_Toshabim_), from whom were drawn those 70,000 burden-bearers, and 80,000 quarry-men, the Helots of Palestine, who were placed under the charge of 3600 Israelite officers. The blotches of smoke are still visible on the walls and roofs of the subterranean quarries where these poor serfs, in the dim torchlight and suffocating air, "laboured without reward, perished without pity, and suffered without redress." The sad narrative reveals to us, and modern research confirms, that the purple of Solomon had a very seamy side, and that an abyss of misery heaved and moaned under the glittering surface of his splendour.[248] Jerusalem during the twenty years occupied by his building must have presented the disastrous spectacle of task-masters, armed with rods and scourges, enforcing the toil of gangs of slaves, as we see them represented on the tombs of Egypt and the palaces of Assyria. The sequel shows the jealousies and discontents even of the native Israelites, who felt themselves to be "scourged with whips and laden with heavy burdens." They were bondmen in all but name, for purposes which bore very little on their own welfare. But the curses of the wretched aborigines must have been deeper, if not so loud. They were torn from such homes as the despotism of conquest still left to them, and were forced to hopeless and unrewarded toil for the alien worship and hateful palaces of their masters. Five centuries later we find a pitiable trace of their existence in the 392 _Hierodouloi_, menials lower even than the enslaved _Nethinim_, who are called "_sons of the slaves of Solomon_"--the dwindling and miserable remnant of that vast levy of Palestinian serfs.