A lot turns on words. In Hebrew, today and millennia ago when the Bible was written, the word mostly used for slavery is ‘avdut. From that same root come words used to mean work, such as people do through their lives, and service, as in the Temple service or the service of prayer.

Marshall’s decision shows most clearly how sacrifice cleanses power and strengthens it.
The meanings are clearly related, yet clearly there is a range of value, going from divine service as an ultimate kind of good all the way down to involuntary servitude, which is an ultimate kind of evil.
There is a similar range of meaning to the concept of freedom. To those whose idea of freedom means destruction of norms, Edmund Burke replied:
Permit me then to continue our conversation, and to tell you what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men entitled. This is the more necessary, because, of all the loose terms in the world, liberty is the most indefinite. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint.
A nation that is self-governed requires self-governing people. By age three, we get that the play of life requires self-restraint, self- governance. If power is vested in the people, then, given that power can be used either for good or its opposite, a good self-governing nation will need to have people capable of choosing the good themselves. We cannot say that we are free to let the moral issue sort itself out and we are to concern ourselves only with power — unless we embrace the tyrant’s creed that might is right.
America’s founders, as a group, were resolved to make sure this country did not become a tyranny. The Framers of the Constitution, in particular, set up a political architecture based on the structural soundness of the triangle. They set up three coequal...