Exodus 21:1-13 ▼

1 |Now these are the ordinances which you are to set before them:

2 |If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve for six years; but on the seventh he shall go out as a free man without payment.

3 |If he comes alone, he shall go out alone; if he is the husband of a wife, 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 belong to her master, and he shall go out alone.

5 |But if the slave plainly says, 'I love my master, my wife and my children; I will not go out as a free man,'

6 then his master shall bring him to God, then he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. And his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him permanently.

7 |If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do.

8 |If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He does not have authority to sell her to a foreign people because of his unfairness to her.

9 |If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters.

10 |If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights.

11 |If he will not do these three [things] for her, then she shall go out for nothing, without [payment of] money.

12 |He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.

13 |But if he did not lie in wait [for him], but God let [him] fall into his hand, then I will appoint you a place to which he may flee.