Exodus 21:1-19 ▼

1 “ And these are the judgments that you shall set before their faces:

2 If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out as the free for nothing.

3 If he comes in by himself, by himself he shall go out; if he is husband of a wife, then his wife shall go out with him.

4 If his lord gives to him a wife, and she bears to him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be unto her lord, and he shall go out by himself.

5 And if the servant surely declares, ‘I love my lord, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’

6 then his lord shall bring him to the judges. And He shall bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his lord shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.

7 And if a man sells his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the manservants go out.

8 If she is displeasing in the eyes of her lord who has betrothed her to himself, then he shall redeem her. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, in his dealing deceitfully with her.

9 And if he has betrothed her to his son, he shall deal with her according to the judgment of the daughters.

10 If he takes another wife for himself, her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights he shall not diminish.

11 And if he does not do these three for her, then she shall go out free without silver.

12 The one who strikes a man so that he dies must surely be put to death.

13 And if he did not lie in wait and God caused it to meet his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where there he may flee.

14 But if a man acts presumptuously against his neighbor to kill him by treachery, you shall take him away from My altar to die.

15 And the one who strikes his father or his mother must surely be put to death.

16 And the one who steals a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, he must surely be put to death.

17 And the one who curses his father or his mother must surely be put to death.

18 And if men contend with each other and one strikes his neighbor with a stone or with a fist, and he does not die and falls to bed,

19 if he rises again and walks about outside with his staff, then the one who struck him shall be acquitted; only for the loss of his time he shall pay, and for his complete healing.