On the use of “bond and free” in Alma 11:43:
“Bond and free” no doubt owes a debt to Galatians 3:28: “There is neither
Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor
female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Nevertheless, slavery (“bond”) was
known in Mesoamerica, and the Ammonihahites would have understood it. (Brant A.
Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of
Mormon, 6 vols. [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books], 4:192)
Gardner makes
reference to the following work from Norman Hammond. I tracked down the source,
so I will quote the relevant portion:
Some of those employed on a major Classic-period public-works program,
such as the construction of Ah Cacau's funerary pyramid (Temple I) at Tikal,
would have been from the literate and iconographically educated elite,
including those responsible for the conception, detailed design and execution
of the project; but many more would have been skilled artisans, including
stone- and wood- carvers, stucco-workers, and painters, and yet others would
have been unskilled laborers, quarriers of fill and haulers of stone. These common
laborers were presumably part of the basal stratum of urban Maya society, a
layer which also supplied the cleaners, porters, and other people needed to
keep any complex society operating. Outside the main population concentrations,
where neither urban elite nor the skilled artisans servicing them were to be
found, the lowest stratum would have been that of rural farmers, producing the
food to support the entire edifice of Classic society.
Less socially visible are the poor, the servants or serfs equivalent
to the mayaques of central Mexico, and slaves. Colonial sources tell us
that slaves could be born to that state, sell themselves from freedom into
slavery, or be captives who had escaped sacrifice. The term is evocative, and
it may well be that Maya slavery was less exploitative, and more like the
villeinage of medieval England, or the patron-client relationship with mutual
obligations that Tambiah (1977:90) notes for medieval Southeast Asia. (Norman
Hammond, “Inside the Black Box: Defining Maya Polity,” in Classic Maya
Political History, ed. T. Patrick Culbert [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991], 265)
