As to your comments on Ephesians 6:5, you didn't confine the understanding of your interpretation within the culture of that era. In a modern context and the current American culture, I take it as advice within the Employer/Employee relationship. However, in the American antebellum era of Slavery - much closer to the culture of the Apostles era - the advice was to keep your heads down, hand on the plow, and keeping a low profile, promoting the civility of the Christlike nature. This being the highest purpose, to win souls to believe in Jesus and his Gospel and its teachings - like loving your neighbor. Of course, in both eras great evils were done by tyrannical slave owners. keep in mind that in Jewish Law, as opposed to racial oppression, there were the Jubilee years where freedom was granted. It didn't take a Civil War.
As for your brief section "Contrasts of Fear and Devotion," I prefer the reflection of Biblical love instigating devotion and avoidance of natural consequences to choices we make as individuals.
Unfortunately, as I see it, your section on "Tools of Control" for "Maintaining Social Order" are more a reflection on today's - or at least the 60's - socio-political positional counter-culture and not those of yesteryear. I deduced this signified by your use of the term "the ruling class." Yes, I am sure there was a ruling class back in Biblical history, but most people were more like today's small businessmen and independent farmers and fishermen and the like, striving together with the working class.
My final thoughts are embodied in my experience and experiences. My essays usually strive against misinterpretations of Bible texts and the misconceived dogmas and misappropriated actions precipitating from those errors. For one, the horrors of hell reflected in the art of the Renaissance and the likes of "Dante's Inferno" painted an image more in tune with the fables and fairy tales and the crude, dark, fearful, and cruel imaginations of men during that era. My study of the original word "sheol" has revealed, at least to me, a picture of the manifold phenomenon of choices and consequences and a final Judgment that puts evil and evil people "out of their misery" rather than for some sadistic and obscene purpose of forever torture.
