Exodus21chapter 21

Exodus 21:1

The book of the covenant begins here, and Exodus 24:7 gives it that name after Moses reads it aloud to the people. Three chapters of case law follow the ten commandments, and the first subject taken up is the rights of a slave, set before a nation that had been slaves the month before. The Hebrew root behind serve in this chapter is the one Exodus 1:13 and 1:14 used five times over for the bondage in Egypt.

Exodus 21:2-4

The week of days is laid over a working life, so six years of service end in a seventh year of release for nothing. Verses 3 and 4 set the limit on that release, since a wife the master gave him and the children she bore stay with the master, and the man goes out alone. Deuteronomy 15:13 and 15:14 add what Exodus leaves out here, that the master furnishes him liberally out of his flock and his floor when he sends him away. Jeremiah 34:8 to 34:17 records the one place Scripture reports this law kept and then broken, when Jerusalem freed its servants under Zedekiah and took them back.

Exodus 21:5-6

The law makes room for a servant who declines the release, and the reason he states is love rather than debt or fear. His master brings him to the door post and bores his ear through with an awl, and the Hebrew word for door post here is the one Exodus 12:7 uses of the posts the passover blood was struck on. Older writers read the bored ear as a figure of willing service, and Charles Spurgeon preached it that way in the sermon Ears Bored to the Doorpost, with Psalm 40:6 the verse that reading usually reaches for. What the text itself records is that the man serves him for ever.

Exodus 21:7-8

A daughter sold by her father does not go out as the menservants do, and the verses that follow explain why, since she is sold toward marriage rather than toward field work. If the master who betrothed her has no pleasure in her, he must let her be redeemed, and he is forbidden to sell her on to a strange nation. The ground the verse gives is that he hath dealt deceitfully with her, so a broken betrothal is treated as fraud rather than as a change of mind.

Exodus 21:9-11

Betrothed to the son, she is to be dealt with after the manner of daughters, which places her in the family rather than among the household staff. Verse 10 names three things a second marriage may not reduce, her food, her raiment and her duty of marriage, and verse 11 makes the penalty for withholding any of them her freedom without money. A woman with no property and no standing is handed a claim she can press against the man who bought her.

Exodus 21:12-14

The law separates the man who lies in wait from the man into whose hand God delivered another, and it promises the second a place whither he shall flee. That promise becomes the six cities of refuge at Numbers 35:9 to 35:34 and Joshua 20. Verse 14 shuts the other door, since a man who kills with guile is taken from the altar itself to die, which is what Solomon does to Joab at 1 Kings 2:28 to 2:34.

Exodus 21:15-16

Striking a father or a mother carries the sentence murder carries, which puts a sanction under the fifth commandment of Exodus 20:12. Verse 16 makes stealing a man a capital crime whether he has been sold on or is still found in the thief's hand, and Deuteronomy 24:7 repeats it. Paul lists menstealers among the lawless at 1 Timothy 1:10, and Adam Clarke turned this verse on the slave trade of his own century in his Commentary on the Bible.

Exodus 21:17

Cursing a parent carries the same penalty as striking one, and the two laws stand on either side of the manstealing law in verses 15 and 17. Jesus quotes this verse at Mark 7:10 and Matthew 15:4, against a practice that let a man declare his goods corban and leave his parents unkept. He treats the law as standing and the tradition built over it as the thing that made it of none effect.

Exodus 21:18-19

A quarrel that puts a man in his bed without killing him is not a capital matter, and the one who struck him is quit once the injured man walks abroad upon his staff. What he owes instead is money, the loss of the man's time and the cost of seeing him thoroughly healed. This is the first case in the book of the covenant where an injury is settled by payment, and the rest of the chapter follows the pattern.

Exodus 21:20-21

A master who beats his servant to death under his hand shall be surely punished, and the verse names no exemption for the master and asks no question about the servant's nation. The surrounding codes of the ancient near east handled the death of a slave as damage owed to the owner, and here it is an offence with a penalty on the owner himself. Verse 21 is the hard line, since a servant who continues a day or two leaves the master unpunished on the ground that he is his money, and readers have long divided over whether that clause restrains the master or concedes something to him.

Exodus 21:22-23

This is the most argued pair of verses in the chapter, and the whole question is what mischief covers. One reading takes mischief as harm to the mother alone, so the loss of the child is settled by the fine the husband lays and the judges determine, and the Septuagint's distinction between a formed and an unformed child carried a version of that reading into the early church through Philo and others. The other reading takes mischief as harm to either the mother or the child, so life for life at verse 23 reaches the child, and Keil and Delitzsch argue it that way. The Hebrew at verse 22 says her children come out, using the ordinary verb for going out with the ordinary noun for a child rather than a word for miscarriage, which is why the dispute has never closed.

Exodus 21:24-25

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth: The list sits inside a paragraph about judges determining a payment, so it fixes a ceiling on what may be exacted rather than opening a licence to exact it. John Wesley wrote that the execution of this law was never put into the hands of private persons, and that the tradition of the elders had put a corrupt gloss upon it, which is the gloss Jesus answers at Matthew 5:38 and 5:39. The same rule returns at Leviticus 24:20 and Deuteronomy 19:21. Later rabbinic law read the whole list as monetary compensation, argued at length in the Babylonian Talmud at Bava Kamma 83b and 84a, a body of discussion compiled by about the sixth century.

Exodus 21:26-27

The eye and the tooth of the talion list come back two verses later applied to a servant, and the outcome there is freedom rather than an answering injury. A master who destroys an eye or knocks out a tooth loses the servant altogether and gets nothing back. Adam Clarke observed that if the law failed to teach the slaveholder mercy it at least taught him caution, since one rash blow could cost him everything he had paid for.

Exodus 21:28-29

The goring ox is stoned and its flesh may not be eaten, so the animal is put under a bloodguilt rather than slaughtered for meat. Genesis 9:5 had already said that at the hand of every beast the LORD would require the life of man. Verse 29 turns on notice, since an owner who was told his ox was wont to push with his horn and did not keep him in is put to death alongside the animal.

Exodus 21:30-31

The sentence on the negligent owner can be commuted for a sum of money, and the verse calls what he pays the ransom of his life. This is the one capital sentence in the chapter that may be bought off, and the offer is not extended to the man who kills with guile at verse 14 or to the manstealer at verse 16. Verse 31 carries the same judgment over to a gored son or daughter, so a child is reckoned at the rate of a grown man.

Exodus 21:32

thirty shekels of silver: A servant killed by the ox is settled at a fixed price paid to the master, and the ox is stoned as in the cases above. Zechariah 11:12 and 11:13 name the same sum as the wages weighed out for the shepherd and then cast to the potter in the house of the LORD. Matthew 26:15 reports thirty pieces of silver paid for Jesus, and Matthew 27:9 and 27:10 quote the prophecy at the moment the money buys the potter's field.

Exodus 21:33-34

An uncovered pit makes the man who dug it liable for what falls in, which stretches responsibility from what a man does to what a man leaves behind him. He pays the owner the value of the beast and keeps the carcase, so the loss moves across rather than doubling. Matthew Henry wrote that it is not enough to avoid designing mischief, since a man must also contrive to prevent it or he becomes accessory to his neighbour's damage.

Exodus 21:35-36

Where one ox kills another and neither owner knew of any danger, the live ox is sold and both the money and the dead animal are divided, so the loss falls evenly on two men who did nothing wrong. Verse 36 changes that the moment the ox was known to push in time past, and its owner pays ox for ox and keeps the carcase himself. Knowledge is what the chapter has been measuring throughout, at verse 14 with the man who lay in wait, at verse 29 with the owner who was warned, and here with a man who had watched his animal do it before.