Exodus21chapter 21

The chapter opens the case law of the covenant, and Rashi reads its first word as a join. Because the verse begins with "and these", the judgments stand with what went before, and were given at Sinai as the Ten Words were. He reads the placing of the civil laws after the law of the altar as a lesson in where a court belongs. It is "To tell you that you should seat (i. e. provide quarters for) the Sanhedrin in the vicinity of the Temple" (Rashi on Exodus 21:1:1). The servant laws get the same close work. The servant of the second verse is a servant who is himself a Hebrew, argued out of the wording of Deuteronomy 15:12 (Rashi on Exodus 21:2:1). The daughter of the seventh verse is a minor. Rashi reasons from the freedom the text gives her that a girl past that age is never sold at all (Rashi on Exodus 21:7:1, citing Arakhin 29b). Where the chapter speaks of bringing the servant to God, Rashi reads the word as the court (Rashi on Exodus 21:6:1). The reading that matters most to a Christian reader is the one on the eye for an eye. Rashi takes it as money. "If one blinded the eye of his fellow-man he has to pay him the value of his eye" (Rashi on Exodus 21:24:1, citing Bava Kamma 84a). Every other case in the list is settled the same way. The man who kills without lying in wait is the man who acted "if he did not lie in ambush for him" and without premeditation (Rashi on Exodus 21:13:1). Rashi is quoted here from the Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary translated by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929 to 1934, which Sefaria reports as public domain.