When I was a young boy, our family made a vacation trip to East Texas one summer to visit relatives there. One of the vivid memories of that trip was a tour of a Texas ranch… where we watched some cowboys hard at work… branding their steers. A mark was made on each steer to dramatically and clearly signify who his owner was.

Something like that was done to human beings in Biblical times. In New Testament times, slavery was quite common. Slaves were regarded as pieces of property… and they were marked with visible signs which indicated

• To whom they belonged,
• Who their owner was,
• Who their master was.

Historians tell us that

• Some slaves were marked by a brand on the forehead,
• Some by a tattoo on the wrist,
• And as strange as this may sound to us today,
• … Another mark of slavery …