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Carbon Dating & The Shroud of Turin
BlackTyranny writes "The Shroud of Turin, carbon dated in 1978 by a team of scientists, may be far older than originally thought. Raymond N. Rogers, a retired chemist from the University of California-operated Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, part of the original team, used samples given to him in 2003 from the Cardinal of Turin's scientific advisor. Roger's contends that the carbon dating might be faulty because "the people who cut the sample didn't do a very good job of characterizing the samples," that is, taking samples from many areas of the cloth." I think the shroud 'Patch' may be made of the big foot suit. ;)
It's pretty generally accepted already by all those without blind faith that the piece of fabric known as the Turin Shroud is not what Jesus was wrapped in. Further experimentation with and investigation of it seems to me an extraordinary waste of money.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
First:
...
A chemist who worked on testing of the Shroud of Turin says new analysis of the fiber indicates the cloth that some say was the burial linen of Jesus could be up to 3,000 years old.
Then:
The Shroud of Turin, the 14-foot linen revered by some as the burial cloth of Jesus, may have been woven around the time of his death.
Give or take a thousand years, eh?
...and there really isn't any proof on it having been the one that some guy 2000 years ago was in.
relics were a big business, and still are.
there were literally tons of wood that was supposedly from the cross that jesus was supposedly nailed to.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As an agnostic and a humanist, I feel nobody has the right to chastise other's for their beliefs. That goes for everyone, including CmdrTaco and the person offended by CmdrTaco. Though I admist that CmdrTaco's comment is a statement of opinion and not chastisment (but it could very well be interpretted as that), whilst the anoynmous coward's above statement is a blatant attack. so, to the autor of "Dumbest. Editor. Evar.", thus spake Zarathustra: "STFU".
I'm not a scientist, but surely there are more interesting things going in the world than this?
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
"But there was virtually no vanillin left in the shroud, leading the chemist to calculate it could be far older than the radiocarbon testing indicated".
This is a chemical analysis along the lines of the fact that all the vanillin has disappeared, assuming it was there to start with, and that it disappears at a predictable rate (without knowing the temperature and other conditions it was stored in).
The carbon dating on the other hand measures the ratios of isotopes of carbon. The ratio of isotopes of carbon in all living matter is known, and it produces other isotopes at a predictable rate dependent only on time after death or harvest of the matter (cotton, bone, etc). This is a nuclear process that is independent of temperature, humidity, chemical environment, etc.
My money is on the physicists.
the british museum's dating was patheticly incompetent, failing to account for the role of accumulating bioplastic coating on the fibers, the preservation of the shroud in oil during the late renaissance, and now, as has been demonstrated by use of other dating methods, the selection of repair materials for the dating. the only reason it was ever accepted was that it's results were pleasing to the rejectionist viewpoint.
vanillin decay products demonstrate that the shroud is composed of materials of two distinct periods, one consistent with it's documented provenance (to the 13th century), and one consistent with its physical characteristics (1000 BC to 700AD).
given that it is the only proposed physical artifact of a pivotal event in human history, with profound import, compentent pursuit of an accurate and factual account of its characteristics is a very worthwhile endeavour, and entirely undeserving of the deceitful mockery of the poster.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
For those (like myself) who are secular, I wish to point out the single greatest problem in the religious view of the Shroud. The clerics simply assume that the shroud belongs to Jesus (assuming that he existed at all) and then direct their scientists to prove that the shroud belonged to Jesus. This type of reasoning is "Assume the conclusion to be true. Then prove the conclusion." I thought that scientific inquiry is "We don't know what to expect. Let's probe and collect the scientifically provable facts. Then, we draw a conclusion from the facts."
Somehow I think bearing the Son of Man in your womb is a little different than coveting your neighbor.
Christians hate unmarried mothers and adultery and women who have children with men who aren't their husbands otherwise
Christians aren't supposed to hate anyone, but rather hate the sin. We're all sinners in this world. Becoming a Christian doesn't make one sinless - but hopefully makes them sin less. I'm sorry if your view of Christianity has been skewed by those who don't hold to true beliefs.
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
As an agnostic and a humanist, I feel nobody has the right to chastise other's for their beliefs.
Incorrect. This is covered by the first amendment. In the case of religious beliefs, the government has no right to interfere, but everyone else has a fundamental right to the freedom to make fun of the crap other people believe in.
As an atheist I believe that religion is based on no factual basis whatsoever and exists purely as a fantasy in which religious people choose to believe.
I don't see why I shouldn't evangalize my beliefs and try and save as many people as I can from these dangerous religious delusions.
Um, aren't you chastising Cmdr Taco's belief that he has a right to chastise Christian's beliefs?
Uh, no. Taco is allowed to believe he has the right to chastise Christians' beliefs, he's just not allowed to actually do it.
Of course, mainly it's just gauche. It's like a Jewish friend of mine who went out of her way to help a person who was having a spot of trouble at work. The person told my friend that it was "awfully Christian of her." Of course, my friend knew what she meant was something like "Your actions are in accord with ideals that I was taught by Christianity, and which are held by other religions such as Judaism." But it's rather like a segregationist telling W.E.B. DuBois that it was "awfully white of him."
The downside of the death of the idea of propiety is that it has stripped our culture of language and tools to describe situations like this. There is a great gaping whole on the continuum that starts at "OK" and runs through "morally wrong", "should be illegal" ending up at "downright evil". Between "OK" and "morally wrong", there is a whole range of qualities, including: gauche, impolite, rude, and offensive.
Mocking somebody's beliefs, depending on the context, falls somewhere in this range.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
why? just because someone uses it to show that there is or is not evidence that faith in something super natural has merit does not hurt the scientific method. I mean, it either discovers that there is a god or there is not a god or we do not know.... how are any of those outcomes harmful to the scientific method?
I think you are just an idiot.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The scientific evidence is "overwhelmingly" true and we should not deny the "scientific" evidence. When the scientific evidence shows the carbon dating was potentially done on a patch of the shroud of turin, it's because it was made from the "bigfoot" suit (happy face).
But then it just goes to show you that there's more to religious beliefs than religion...
especially the right to insult someone who has beliefs that are not based on anything real
Let me insult you now, because you clearly mistake "beliefs" with "knowledge". By definition, beliefs do not need to be based on anything real. If you want to base something on "anything real" - you need to have a certain belief, namely believe that there is actually something which is both real and accessible to your senses. It's a common belief, but still a belief - you might as well be a classic "brain in a jar" and see only simulacra. This belief is NOT based on anything real, because you base your perception of reality on this belief, so if you'd try to do it otherwise, you'd have a typical fool's circle.
there's nothing DUMB about joking about a piece of cloth that shouldn't really be worth anything to you if you believed it to be real.
Well, if you take the assumption that the Shroud is a medieval counterfeit (and this is also my belief, if you ask) - you'd have to assume that someone in Middle Ages was tortured to death and his dead body was somehow proto-photographed on the linen, which might be possible technically even then. Anatomical details are just too accurate for the Shroud to be merely a paintwork coming from the artist's imagination (medieval painters in the era of Giotto di Bondone simply did not know how to paint human body accurately, this knowledge was rediscovered in late Renaissance). So watching the Shroud, you watch a recording of someone's pain and death. If you find someone's torment and agony funny, I'd say that you are dumb indeed (that's for the insult).
Faith and science are two totally different and incompatible methods of acquiring knowledge.
Faith is not a method of aquiring knowledge, it's a method of retaining a belief.
AccountKiller
An article about the Shroud of Turin is in the Science/Space section of USA Today. Even with carbon dating a Shroud believer wants to cast doubt upon, it belongs in the religion section, or something to that effect. USA today is McNewspaper. It is not fit for the bottom of a birdcage.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
So me, as a computer scientist who has studied the pros and cons of Christianity as much as I can, and have come to the conclusion that God is real, is deluded?
Have you ever actually read and studied the gospels? If you havent, how can you possibly say your opinion is right when you havent even studied the evidence?
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
the story of the Shroud is known at least from 1300,
the question is not who is the man (the catholic church calls it "The man of the Shoud", never had been an official imprimatur to be Jesus)
but how the image was generated, why the author knows more of anathomy (and history) than the known knowledge of that time, why it's unique in cloth printing ecc
The science has lots to undestand from a pure scientific point of view from those meters of clothes.
First, let me say that I am a Christian, and I hold my faith to be a guiding and supporting influence in my life. As to the authenticity of Shroud of Turin, I personaly have doubts about its authenticity, but I refuse to pass final judgment on the matter as I doubt we will ever have all the facts. In the final analysis however no proof, scientific or other wise will matter.
"For those who do not believe no proof is sufficient. For those who do believe no proof is necessary." -- Unknown source
"I'm making perfect sense, you're just not keeping up."
It isn't a strictly scientific view, but I think we can safely assume that someone named Jesus did live and die in Judea 2000 years ago. While we don't have any physical evidence, the circumstantial evidence is pretty good. The earliest Christian writings we have are from Paul of Tarsus, penned around A.D. 50. And while Paul never actually met Jesus, his writings, as well as that of the Gospel of Mark (circ. A.D. 70), were still recent enough after the crucifixion (circ. A.D. 30 or so) for there to still be people alive who had either known Jesus or been around when he died. His assault on the temple moneychangers, trial and execution was pretty heady stuff, kind of like O.J. Simpson and Scott Peterson. If People Magazine had been around in ancient Judea, we'd probably have some good pictures as well as an exclusive interview with Peter on why he denied his lord three times. :)
That said, like you, I am not a Christian, largely because Christianity makes no sense and has nothing to do with Jesus. Christians these days go apoplectic over forcing the Ten Commandments into public spaces and institutionalizing bigotry, yet seem to care little for the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. They're the first to justify violence for whatever end despite Jesus exhorting them to "turn the other cheek" and promising "the meek shall inherit the Earth."
You've provided links to religious nut-case web sites, a non-peer-reviewed article by someone named "Anita Moon" with no apparent credentials, and an uncredited essay hosted on the site of an English Instructor from Spokane Community College. That uncredited essay actually cites, as one of its sources an "article" on www.christiananswers.net! Yeah, that's real, unbiased, peer-reviewed science, isn't it?
If it upsets you when science effectively disproves the 2000 year old fables, fairy tales, and myths that you need as a psychological crutch, then stay away from web sites which are pro-science.
I'd remind the readers that science is fallible.
Of course. But you sound like you're using the fallibility of science to justify what you already believe. In other words "it MUST be the real Jesus shrowd, not that I have any evidence it is.. but eventually science will show the counter-evidence is wrong because.. well it MUST be". That's not how science works. Sure, it's possible the science is faulty.. but you don't just assume it is because the evidence doesn't back up your own, unsubstatiated beliefs. That's just patently dishonest.
In science you take all the evidence and make a conclusion based on that with the understanding that it's not the final word on the matter. In other words, you don't get to use science only when it backs up what you want to believe, but claim faulty science when it doesn't.
AccountKiller
Ever consider that maybe this belief is based less on fact than some of those who apprehend or believe spiritual or religious truths?
--pyro_dude
Really? I've searched for credible evidence. I've found a lot of people claiming that's there's evidence, but I've never been able to find anyone that could actually cite legitimate evidence. No one. If you've got real proof that actually holds up under scrutiny, then don't hide it under a bushel, no--let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!
Somehow I think bearing the Son of Man in your womb is a little different than coveting your neighbor.
:-) In both cases, the woman is following a primal need to reproduce and found a mate based on ability to provide and stability. It's actuallyl a story right out of a Harlequin romance, if you ask me.
:-)
Well, maybe not really.
Becoming a Christian doesn't make one sinless - but hopefully makes them sin less.
Aha, finally a Christian comes up with a testable theory! Let's see. Theory: Christians do less crime than others. Let's consult the stats. Any takers?
If true, then this one fact would justify the religion in my view. If not, well, just another crazy fad.
Currently hooked on AMP
No, it's a position based on known facts and evidence of how the world and the universe work.
Depsite the fact that there are dozens of religions which believe in various kinds of gods and deities not one of them have proved the existence or provided any evidence at all for the existence of the god or deity which they believe in.
As soon as one does provide some credible evidence I will be willing to re-appraise my position.
Until then I will continue to believe that religion exists because every one alive has wondered at some point "why am I here ?" and "what happens when I die ?" and it's easier to believe that nice things which you have some control over happen and that we are here thanks to a creator we can understand and talk to through prayer. That is easier to believe than us being here through a fantastically complicated series of interactions which we will probably never understand and have no control over and when we die that's it.
Um, "Arab" is an ethnicity, not a religion. The majority of Arabs are Muslims, of course, but there are also Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs (yes, really!), Zoroastrian Arabs, Hindu Arabs, and, one assumes, atheist Arabs, although those who live surrounded by the aforementioned groups probably tend to keep pretty quiet about it.
And you know, while it's almost certainly true that most Arabs are Muslims, I'm not sure that the reverse is true. Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim country; there's also Bangladesh, Pakistan, and large portions of India. That's a hell of a lot of people, almost none of them speaking Arabic as a native tongue.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
There is zero evidence not in religious texts of dubious authorship and authenticity which have been carefully selected and edited by the Church. None. Not a word anywhere in spite of the fact that the Roman Empire was in charge and they kept records of everything important. The Catholic church, as an institution, is nearly 2000 years old and has had ample time to either: a) find Roman or other evidence which would prove his existence and widely publish it, b) destroy records or evidence which cast doubt on his existence, or c) produce fake records or evidence.
There are no examples of a), the shroud is a fine example of c) - and you can make your own call on b).
Crime can be a moral imperitive, against a corrupt or evil system of law a christian is required to stand up and say no. consider the jusuit city-states in south america, founded to stop the people of latin america being enslaved, or the christians imprisioned during the american civil rights movement, or the christians who acted to try and help Jews/blacks/etc escape the Nazi holocaust
Insofar as you can not know the heart of a man, you can not know what they truely believe. There are, and remain, those who say that they believe, and yet do not.
Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
Matthew 7:15-20
Since the test of belief is the fruit (action), then your proposed test is invalid, even controlling for the demands of civil disobedience placed on those who would act ethically.
Most of the religious justification for hating gays comes from Leviticus, but damn few people ever read the whole text. The people who wrote it were freaking nuts. It's like a read from Rev. Moon's writings -- control for its own sake. Superstition and common sense mixed together with a massive dash of fanaticism.
Well, it's a semantic win for theists when you call yourself and "a-theist", a person who, as they define it, "doesn't believe in God".
:)
Do you call yourself an a-Hinduist or a non-believer in the Norse gods? You don't have to, because people don't believe in such, for the most part, in the U.S. and don't feel compelled to define themselves by naming themselves non-believers in the Hindu, Norse, etc. pantheons.
The term "atheist" has been semantically hijacked to mean "unbeliever in the christian god" To apply it to yourself puts a rhetorical bullet in your head before the argument even starts.
"Agnostic" is better, one, because it doesn't have the semantic disadvantage, and secondly because it more accurately defines who you are: a person who declares that he hasn't any special knowledge (a-gnostic) and can't possibly have any answers. It's a "who-knows?" category which better suits a reasonable person. It also implies nobody else has the answers either.
My one peeve about the word is that it's mispronounced! It should be: AAY-NOSTIK, not AG-NOSTIK. We pronounce gnostic NOSTIK, not G'NOSTIK. Sheesh.
- The very people who maintain the Shroud as a holy artifact
- Who by definition believe in its authenticity
- Who have every reason to want it to be proven authentic
- Who control access to it, and
- Who only permitted research on it after a long and difficult negotiation with the scientists involved,
didn't allow anyone to have the proper things to test?Isn't it easier just to believe that the claims of authenticity are false, and that people are clinging to it because of what they want to be true?
Rogers looks like someone who will believe regardless of the evidence, and is thus someone whose "scientific" results are not trustworthy. The McPaper article quotes Rogers saying " the blood spots on it are real blood", when the actual material of the "blood stains" has been proven to be red ochre. Am I also being asked to believe that Jesus bled red ochre?
Refusing to accept the reality that the "artifact" is a 14th-century creation says nothing about the dating process, and everything about your prejudices. It's not what its keepers think it is. Get over it.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
History is not written in stone. Unless you have multiple primary, independent sources saying the same thing, you can't really be sure what happened. Here are just two possibilities:
1. Da Vinci heard of the shroud, found it was a poor forgery, and set out to create a better one, which he passed off as the original.
2. Da Vinci created a history for the shroud himself.
I have no idea if these scenarios are very likely. I'm just pointing out that history is seldom clear-cut and reliable.
Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed. Neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen com upon thee.
a nation that managed to thrive and grow to eventually produce movements which now dominate most of the world.
I'm really confused by the "mingled seed" comment.
Civilizations which planted multiple crops on one field, used crop rotation and cross-bred plants were very successful in agriculture, and I don't see how that would be unsanitary.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The public education system strikes again. The first amendment was designed to prevent the restriction of criticism of government. The idea that it preserves rudeness, mockery, and shouting fire in a crowded theater is simply wrong.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
The simplest argument I've ever heard against the shroud being real (i.e. an actual burial cloth) is the image of Jesus supposedly imprinted on it. The face/body have roughly the same dimensions as a normal human face, except for some blurring. However, this is NOT what you would expect on a piece of cloth wrapped around someone! If the "imprint" came from an actual body then when the shroud was removed the image, in particular the face, should be severely stretched horizontally. It should definitely NOT look like a photograph or a painting. This is because the cloth has to wrap around the face and actually cover the whole thing.
Take a soda bottle and a piece of paper. Cover the front half of the bottle (i.e. a 180-degree slice cylindrically). This represents the face. Mark the edges with pencil. Now hold up the paper and compare the "wrapped" length of the image (between the pencil marks) with the "visible" image (how wide the bottle looks when viewed straight-on). Photographs, paintings, and the image on the shroud have the "straight-on" dimensions. Regardless of how old the cloth is, the image is way too narrow. It's fake.
I thought it was the word of God. Are you trying to tell me that God had a lacking scientific understanding? I thought he was omniscient.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
The bible wasn't transcribed by God, but by man. It contains within it an image of the Word of God, but the Bible itself is not the whole of the Word; the whole of the Word is the living Christ. Much of the Bible (such as much of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) is history.
God dictated many laws to the prophets, and some were derived. It was the job of the Aaronic priesthood to determine what meant "clean" and "unclean". As we are imperfect beings, we cannot always discern God's commands perfectly.
DISCLAIMER: this is from a Roman Catholic, not Jewish, perspective. I am not, and have never been a Jew, so I can't speak much on Jewish theology.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
First to makes things clear: I am a Christian, and personally have many doubts about the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. I'm really nervous when many extreme Christians, or fanatics for that matter will try to use the Shroud of Turin as proof for anything. We Christians absolutely DON'T need this artifact to be of any proof of our faith. If it turns out to be consistant with the time-frame that my personal savior was killed on the cross, then that that's great, hopefully there would be more believers, but if it isn't...so what? It is just an artifact. This message board has placed too many emphasis on the relation between the Shroud of Turin and Christianity as a religious whole. I really hope everyone, nonbelievers and believers can sever this relationship.
Well Paul spoke with the authority of Jesus in 2 Timothy 3:16, saying that all scripture is God breathed, therefore we can trust the original autographical version of the Bible to be exactly the words that God intended to be conveyed. God often spoke and acted through history and certainly was also responsible for the laws found in the Mosaic books. One of the purposes of them was to show just how impossible it is to remain clean through human effort, thereby pointing the way to the need for a redeemer i.e. Jesus.
You know every time I hear something like this I am reminded of the psychological phenomenon of 'rationalisation' ... whereby we make excuses for things we want to believe.
Sure there is bound to be local wisdom in these ideas, there is in every society when you look close enough. Nothing special there. But there is almost certainly ignorance, and we should remember that in hindsight one can concoct an almost infinite number of reasons to explain something independent of whether it is true. This is the reason Karl Popper thought History was unscientific.
Bitter and proud of it.
If it weren't for Paul glomming onto the nascent Christian sect (power hunger thugs know a good thing when they see one) it might have died off as a historical footnote.
I guess we'd be in a nation "under Zeus", Mormons swearing Zeus had visited the Southwest, African Americans singing gospel, err, uh, Zeusal songs, everyone Thankgsiving to Zeus, Zeus on the money...
I guess only TV preachers would be slightly different, as they wouldn't have to apologize for being caught with prostitutes, after all, What Would Zeus Do is pretty obvious.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That Old Testament stuff doesn't apply anymore. We're bound by the New Testament new covenant, wherein the omnipotent, omnibenevolent, perfect God changed his mind and we are to turn the other cheek and lead by example rather than execute someone who fucks a man's or a horse's ass.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
" I have read the whole text."
I meant Leviticus, not the Bible. The christian bible, as a whole, really doesn't lend itself to analysis. It's too many pieces from too many times written by too many different types of people. On top of all that, it was sliced, editted, and rebuilt constantly. There is no overall theme that you can sink your teeth into. A theme can be chosen for you, taking on the aspects supporting whatever they like while they toss whatever they like. Hence the American Christians/Baptists, who believe in a Warrior Jesus rather than a teaching Jesus, etc., blending Old and New Testaments to support the worldview that Bush believes in -- America as Jesus's warrior army, taming evil around the world in preparation for the Apocalypse. YMMV for INRI.
While the science of "born with it" may be more driven by politics than real (isn't it sad people have to say they were born with something just not to be thrown in jail?) nevertheless there's no reason to suggest it is something that needs to be "treated".
In a free society, the people do not grant the government the power to regulate sexual activity.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
When the original king james version translators did their thing, they took care to note which parts were literal translations of the greek, and which parts were put in by them to make it proper english. They did this with itallics Anything in itallics is a word inserted by the translators. Also, for the new testament, there in no punctuation of any sort in the original greek. All letters are capitalized, and not as much as spaces between the words, Like this: THENEWTESTAMENTWASWRITTENWITHCAPSLOCKONANDABUSTESS PACEBAR
So let's look at the verse again. Notice how your interpretation of the verse depends on that first 'is' being there. Also notice how it is in itallics. Take it out and reread the verse. Now it only says that those parts of scripture that are given by inspiration of god are profitable, etc. It allows for some scripture to not be given by god, and says nothing about the profitablity etc. of those scriptures.
There are many passages in the Bible that have greatly changed meanings when you move a comma around, or put in those itallic words etc. Other than looking at context or other passages, we no longer have the abillity to determine the correct meaning of these passages. Please try to understand the book that you are using, failure to do so will (as possibly in this example) lead to incorrect assumptions.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
>>Why does one have to assume that someone was 'tortured to death' ?
Well how would four drops of what looks like blood get on the cloth? Only tortured people have small drops of blood right?
Also, with cloth over the face, you wouldn't get a picture. Try this yourself. Rub something on your face and put cloth on your face and try to make something that looks even vaguely face like. It's a fake. And a bad one at that.
The first confirmed sighting of the shroud is low and behold the same date that it carbon dated to. Well, as I live and breath...
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I stop by that passage in Leviticus on how to do slavery up right in the eyes of the Lord.
Are you kidding ? The slavery laws were way advanced for the age. An age when slavery was as common economical practice as being an employer today.
The ancient israelites insistence on freeing slaves every 50 years ensured that whole FAMILIES will not have to stay in slavery, and lack of freedom was so frowned on that a slave choosing to REMAIN a slave would be branded in shame. Again, this is the old world - compare this to the neighbours, even to the later, relatively tolerant, Romans, where slavery was practially the only game in town.
Working for necessity's mother.