Exodus 21:1-11
Because the Lord redeemed Israel from slavery, Israel’s social life must reflect covenant restraint, justice, and protection for servants rather than unchecked human power.
1 “Now these are the ordinances which you shall set before them:
2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free without paying anything.
3 If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he is married, then his wife shall go out with him.
4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself.
5 But if the servant shall plainly say, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I will not go out free;’
6 then his master shall bring him to God, and shall bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.
7 “If a man sells his daughter to be a female servant, she shall not go out as the male servants do.
8 If she doesn’t please her master, who has married her to himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt deceitfully with her.
9 If he marries her to his son, he shall deal with her as a daughter.
10 If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marital rights.
11 If he doesn’t do these three things for her, she may go free without paying any money.
Because the LORD redeemed Israel from slavery, Israel’s social life must reflect covenant restraint, justice, and protection for servants rather than unchecked human power.
To introduce the covenant case laws by regulating the treatment, release, family implications, and protection of Hebrew servants within Israel’s redeemed covenant community.
This passage follows Exodus 20:22-26, where the Lord regulates worship after Sinai by forbidding rival gods and instructing altar worship. Exodus 21:1-11 begins the Book of the Covenant with social and household case laws. It applies the redeemed identity of Exodus 20:2 and the neighbor-protecting commandments of Exodus 20:12-17 to concrete covenant community situations involving servants, families, release, and vulnerable women.
These judgments follow the Ten Words and altar instructions, beginning the Book of the Covenant. In the ancient Near Eastern setting, debt-servitude and household servitude were social realities. The passage does not create an ideal of servitude; it regulates existing social conditions under the authority of the LORD who had just delivered Israel from Egypt.
Case Laws for Covenant Justice, Human Dignity, and Restitution
The LORD gives Israel concrete case laws so that redeemed life will be marked by justice, protection of life, restraint of power, restitution for harm, and accountability for negligence.