Slavery is the institution whereby one person can hold ownership rights over another.
Biblical forms of slavery were significantly different than New World Slavery. Freemen worked in their own fields and craft workshops, characteristic of Babylonia in the 1 st millennium BC 2. Semi-free serfs, helots, subjected to extra economic coercion and worked from generation to generation on land belonging to temples and palaces. Ethnically, consisted of natives and captives. Although closely akin to slaves, serfs were between freemen and slaves.