“You were bought at a price”
1 Corinthians 6:19–20
Cultural referenceSettledPaul
You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A soft metaphor for being valued.
The cultural key
Slave-market language, exact and unsentimental: the price (time) is what changed hands at the block, and the buyer's ownership extended to the body, which is Paul's very point in a passage about what Corinthians do with their bodies. Many readers also hear the manumission practice in which a temple formally 'bought' a slave for a god, freeing the person into sacred ownership (the Delphi inscriptions record hundreds); the parallel is disputed, but the letter's logic runs the same way: purchased out of one servitude into belonging to God.
Recovered meaning
'You are not your own' is a bill of sale, not a mood: freedom in Paul is never self-ownership but a change of master. The body's new owner paid, and the receipt is the cross.
Parallels: 1 Corinthians 7:22–23; Romans 6:22; 1 Peter 1:18–19