Chap. 21
Verse 1
The mishpatim (Exo 21:1) are not the “laws, which were to be in force and serve as rules of action,” as Knobel affirms, but the rights, by which the national life was formed into a civil commonwealth and the political order secured. These rights had reference first of all to the relation in which the individuals stood one towards another. The personal rights of dependants are placed at the head (Exo 21:2-11); and first those of slaves (Exo 21:2-6), which are still more minutely explained in Deu 15:12-18, where the observance of them is urged upon the hearts of the people on subjective grounds.
Verse 2
The Hebrew servant was to obtain his freedom without paying compensation, after six years of service. According to Deu 15:12, this rule applied to the Hebrew maid-servant as well. The predicate עברי limits the rule to Israelitish servants, in distinction from slaves of foreign extraction, to whom this law did not apply (cf. Deu 15:12, “thy brother”).[1]
An Israelite might buy his own countryman, either when he was sold by a court of justice on account of theft (Exo 22:1), or when he was poor and sold himself (Lev 25:39). The emancipation in the seventh year of service was intimately connected with the sabbatical year, though we are not to understand it as taking place in that particular year. “He shall go out free,” sc., from his master's house, i.e., be set at liberty. חנּם: without compensation. In Deuteronomy the master is also commanded not to let him go out empty, but to load him (חעניק to put upon his neck) from his flock, his threshing-floor, and his wine-press (i.e., with corn and wine); that is to say, to give him as much as he could carry away with him. The motive for this command is drawn from their recollection of their own deliverance by Jehovah from the bondage of Egypt. And in Exo 21:18 an additional reason is supplied, to incline the heart of the master to this emancipation, viz., that “he has served thee for six years the double of a labourer's wages,” - that is to say, “he has served and worked so much, that it would have cost twice as much, if it had been necessary to hire a labourer in his place” (Schultz), - and “Jehovah thy God hath blessed thee in all that thou doest,”
- ↑ Saalschütz is quite wrong in his supposition, that עברי relates not to Israelites, but to relations of the Israelites who had come over to them from their original native land. (See my Archδologie, §112, Note 2.)
