Six years, then free — and an ear pierced at the door for the one who stays

This chapter opens the Mishpatim, the ‘ordinances’ — the Torah’s first extended law code, and its own traditional name for this whole Torah portion. The Ten Commandments (ch. 20) were apodictic law: bare, unconditional ‘you shall/shall not.’ What follows here is casuistic law instead — case law, built entirely on ‘if… then,’ the same legal genre found across the ancient Near East, including the far more famous Code of Hammurabi. The two genres sit back to back on purpose: the absolute commands first, then the working-out of what a society actually does with them.

⚠ A Hebrew servant is not what later slavery means, and the text draws the line itself. Six years is a hard ceiling (v2) — a limit this law nowhere sets for a foreign-born slave (see Leviticus 25:44-46, not yet on these pages). The shelf itself splits on what to call him: KJV, ASV, and NIV all read v2 as ‘Hebrew servant,’ while NWT reads ‘Hebrew slave’ outright — the same fork this translation faces and resolves below. A man who has grown to love his household inside servitude may choose to stay permanently, but only through a real, witnessed ritual: brought ‘to God’ (a local shrine or the judges, ancient interpreters differ) and to the doorpost, his ear pierced with an awl (v6, KJV spells it the older way, ‘aul’) — a permanent, visible mark of a voluntary choice, not a brand imposed on him.

⚠ The daughter sold as a servant-wife (vv7–11) gets a different, in some ways stronger, protection than the male servant does. She does not simply go free after six years — because the arrangement is a marriage contract, not ordinary servitude. If her intended husband is displeased with her, he cannot sell her onward to outsiders (v8); if he marries her to his son, she gets a daughter’s standing (v9); and if he takes a second wife, her food, clothing, and conjugal rights (v10) are guaranteed by name. Fail on any of the three, and she goes free with no payment owed by her at all (v11) — a real legal exit clause, in a text with no obligation to supply one.

Five capital sentences, and an altar that stops being a hiding place

Five ‘shall surely be put to death’ sentences run in a row (vv12, 15, 16, 17, and the murder case of v14) — but the FIRST thing this list does, immediately after the opening capital sentence for killing, is carve out the one case where it does not apply. Verse 13's unintentional killer, whom ‘God let fall into his hand,’ is promised a place to flee — the seed of the full city-of-refuge system Numbers 35 will build out in detail (not yet on these pages). The distinction between intent and accident is drawn here, right at the root of the law, not added later as an afterthought.

⚠ Verse 14 answers a real, physical form of asylum that existed at the time: grabbing the horns of the altar. Later narrative shows exactly this move — Adonijah and Joab both cling to the altar horns hoping sanctuary will protect them (1 Kings 1 and 2, not yet on these pages). This verse rules in advance that premeditated murder gets no such protection: ‘you shall take him even from my altar, that he may die.’ The sanctuary can shelter the desperate; it cannot shelter the deliberate.

Striking or cursing a parent (vv15, 17) sit inside the same capital list as murder — not because this translation reads them as morally equivalent, but because the text places them there without comment, and the discipline of this project is to report the text as it stands rather than soften what it actually says. Verse 16's kidnapping law — stealing a person to sell them — is worth holding next to verse 2's own Hebrew-servant law: the same chapter that regulates servitude also makes the trade in human beings, by force, a capital crime.

⚠ Eye for eye — a ceiling on vengeance, not a license for it

The opening two cases here set the scale that everything after them measures against. A fistfight injury that heals is compensated only for lost time and medical cost, not punished as violence in its own right (vv18–19) — the victim's own recovery closes the case. But a master who beats a servant to death IS punished (v20, the same ‘surely be punished’ language used of capital crimes elsewhere in this chapter) — a real check on a master's power over a servant's body, in a document written by and for a slaveholding society. Verse 21's qualifying clause, that no punishment follows if the servant lingers a day or two before dying, ‘for the servant is his property,’ is one of this chapter's hardest sentences precisely because it sits right next to v20's real protection: the text extends genuine legal personhood to the servant and then, in almost the same breath, prices him as an asset. This translation states both halves plainly rather than resolving the tension the Hebrew itself does not resolve.

This is the most famous line in the chapter, and it is very widely misread. ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ (vv23–25) sits inside a specific case — men fighting, a pregnant woman struck, harm following — and its function in that setting is to set a LIMIT: the punishment may not exceed the injury. One eye, not a life, not a feud, not the offender's whole family. Ancient Near Eastern law elsewhere allowed exactly the kind of escalating blood-vengeance this formula caps. Jewish legal tradition from an early date read the whole formula as fixing MONETARY compensation equivalent to the injury, not literal mutilation — a reading vv26–27 make explicit two verses later, where injuring a servant's eye or tooth is compensated not with the master's own eye or tooth but with the servant's freedom.

⚠ This exact verse is quoted, by name, centuries later: ‘you have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ (Matthew 5:38, already on these pages), where Jesus does not deny the law was a real limit on vengeance — he lowers the ceiling further still, to no retaliation at all. Reading Exodus 21 first is worth doing before reading that verse: the sermon is answering an actual legal ceiling, not a caricature of one.

Verse 22's case is genuinely difficult and this translation does not resolve it for the reader. A pregnant woman struck in a fight, her children ‘come out’ (a live birth is at least as natural a reading as a miscarriage), with a fine assessed ‘as the woman's husband shall impose’ — only if further harm follows does the life-for-life scale of vv23–25 apply at all. The shelf splits on exactly this point: KJV and ASV both keep the older, more ambiguous ‘her fruit depart from her,’ while NIV and NWT both commit to ‘she gives birth prematurely,’ leaning the reading toward a live birth rather than leaving it open. Whether the child counts as a life in its own right under this specific statute, or whether the fine in v22 already covers the loss of the pregnancy itself, is genuinely disputed among translators and has been for centuries; this translation reports the ambiguity rather than choosing a side the Hebrew itself does not clearly choose.

The goring ox, and a law shared with Babylon

⚠ This exact case — a habitually goring ox, an owner warned and negligent — appears almost word for word in the Laws of Eshnunna and the Code of Hammurabi, centuries before Moses on any conventional dating. It is one of the clearest, most specific points of contact between biblical law and its wider ancient Near Eastern legal environment: a first offense forfeits the animal alone (v28), a second offense after documented warning costs the owner his own life unless a ransom is accepted instead (vv29–30) — the same two-tier liability structure found in the Mesopotamian codes, adapted rather than invented from nothing.

The same case, run again for a servant instead of a free person (v32), settles at a fixed price: thirty shekels of silver — the same figure Zechariah 11:12 names as ‘the price at which I was valued by them’ (not yet on these pages), and the sum the Gospels report Judas was paid (Matthew 26:15, already on these pages), whether or not either later text means to invoke this specific statute by the number.

Whoever digs the pit owns the fall

The chapter closes on straightforward property law: an uncovered pit (vv33–34), one ox goring another (v35–36, the same warned/unwarned distinction as vv28–29 applied to animal-on-animal harm), and theft with restitution set ABOVE simple replacement — five oxen for one stolen ox, four sheep for one stolen sheep (v37). The multiplied penalty, rather than plain repayment, is the chapter's last word: restitution here is not merely making a victim whole, but making theft a losing proposition.