47 Slave and Free: Hermeneutical Reflections on Paul’s Use of the Slave–Master Metaphor Magnus Zetterholm Introduction During the course of history, slavery, which has existed in virtually ev- ery culture, has created an enormous amount of suffering. Men, women and children have been killed, mutilated and sexually abused, families have been shattered and numerous people have been denied their right to live as free human beings. It is scandalous that slavery still a ffects a large number of people. According to the Global Slavery Index, 1 almost 36 million people today are estimated to live in slavery, if defined as “all of the practices that trap people in modern servitude, including human tra fficking, forced labour, and slavery.” Thus, even though slavery today is outlawed in every country, 2 the practice of holding slaves or people in slave-like conditions persists. One reason for this is that all major world religions have traditions or texts that could and have been understood to legitimize slavery, and slavery is hence deeply integrated in human culture. The Qur’an contains detailed regulations on slavery and the rise of so-called Islamic State (IS) has drawn renewed attention to the issue of institutionalized slavery in parts of contemporary radical Muslim tradition. The Hebrew Bible and Jewish traditions, such as the Talmud, also regulate and thus legitimize 1 www.globalslaveryindex.org. 2 Mauretania was the last country to abolish slavery in 1981. Slavery was, however, criminalized only in 2007.