the supply of males available for physically demanding, labour-
intensive activities like work on a family estate. One imagines that
the incentives offered to a prospective son-in-law for joining his
wife’s family were not inconsiderable
This brings us back to the matter of mixed marriages. Though
slaves were clearly inferior in status to the free members of society,
they were in some circumstances able to contract marriages with
women of free status. As in Hammurabic society, there seems to
have been no legal impediment to a slave marrying a person of free
status. One assumes that the slave-owner’s consent would be
required for the marriage to go ahead, but the Laws have nothing to
say about this.
Several clauses envisage the possibility of a free woman
marrying a slave, which almost certainly indicates that such
marriages did take place. This raises several questions. Firstly, what
effect did a marriage of this kind have on the legal status of the
couple? Let’s look at two clauses from the Laws which appear to
answer this question. As elsewhere in this book, translations of the
Laws are by Harry Hoffner:
If a male slave pays a brideprice for a woman and takes her
as his wife, no-one shall free her from slavery (§34).
If a slave pays a brideprice for a free young man and
acquires him as a son-in-law, no-one shall free him from
slavery (§36).If these translations are correct, then it would appear that free
persons of either sex lose their freedom and become slaves if they
marry slaves–provided a brideprice is paid. Hoffner comments
that by accepting the brideprice, the parents of a free son or
daughter relinquished the right to redeem their offspring from
slavery. But this leaves open the question ofwhysuch a marriage
was contracted in thefirst place.
We can only speculate–always bearing in mind that each law
was very likely inspired by a particular case in the past whose
details are unknown to us. It’s possible that the slave in question
had accumulated a tidy nest-egg, perhaps by acquiring land from
WOMEN,MARRIAGE AND SLAVERY 151