As we continue to make our way through the section of Exodus called the Book of the Covenant, we would do well to make a few notes for going forward. First, let us remember that while these laws are distinguished from the Ten Commandments, they cannot be detached from them. As we said, the Ten Commandments are the summary of God’s law, giving us the major principles for how God expects His people to live. The commands that we are now studying are not by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of rules for Israel to live by; instead, they are particular applications of the principles within the Ten Commandments. They are judgments for sample situations given by God to teach Israel how to enact justice.

Second, while last week’s laws fell under the First and Second Commandments, the commands before us here fall under the domain of Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Commandments. Remember that our Lord summarized the law even further down to two commands: love God and love your neighbor. Of course, those two commandments reflect the structure of the Ten Commandments, since the first four teach us how to love God and the last six focus on love for our neighbor. Thus, we should ultimately hope to learn from these laws before us principles for how we can best love the people around us.

Third, as we study these commands, we should keep in mind that our lives in the Twenty-First Century are the oddities, not the standard. Many of these laws are going to appear somewhat barbaric by our current standards, but in many ways, all of life was more barbaric. We are the historical outliers, not the other way around. Therefore, we should keep in mind the difficulty of life that the Israelites would have faced more than 3000 years ago, and we will then be prepared to see how Yahweh’s rules speak a tremendous amount of grace into our sin-scarred world. Indeed, my chief aim in studying these laws is to help us see the grace and justice that God was showing to His people through them and also that they might ultimately set our eyes upon Christ who is the fulfillment of every law.  

ON SLAVES AND SLAVERY // VERSES 1-11

The first section of laws takes us straight into the deep end by giving laws about slavery. After regulating how He is to be worshiped, it makes sense that God would immediately move into this topic. Israel was a nation of slaves, and they had only left Egypt one-to-two months prior to receiving these commands. However, in the coming years and generations, they would come to possess slaves themselves as well as becoming slaves of one another. Thus, right from the beginning, God is setting regulations to ensure that they do not become like the Egyptians themselves but will treat their slaves with dignity. Indeed, you will notice that verses 1-11 particular deal with how Hebrew slaves ought to be treated. According to Douglas Stuart, this is an important distinction:

The use of the term “Hebrew” here reflects the early date of these laws, when the word referred to the Israelites as a social class rather than merely as an ethnic group. The mixed racial composition of the people receiving God’s covenant law at this point (cf. 12:38) meant that there was a potential for Israelites to employ non-Israelites as slaves/servants. To protect any potential servants from exploitation, the term Hebrew, a broader socioeconomic term than Israelite, is used here appropriately. (476)

Of course, we always tend to wonder whenever we read these sorts of passages why God only regulated slavery rather than banning entirely. Jeffery Leonard gives a thought-provoking answer:

So abhorrent is the notion of slavery to modern minds that it can be difficult to understand why the Scriptures do not simply ban the practice outright. Surely part of the reason for the lack of such a ban is simply that the sheer ubiquity of slavery in the ancient world made it difficult to imagine a circumstance in which the practice did not exist. One might as readily attempt to ban warfare as altogether ban slavery. Indeed, even in the most modern and supposedly slave-free parts of today’s world, practices remarkably similar to slavery continue to exist. Prison sentences certainly constitute a form of involuntary servitude, and even those who argue for dramatic reductions in incarceration generally do not argue for the elimination of imprisonment altogether. Even more relevant is the practice of the military draft, since those pressed into service do not share the same culpability that a guilty prisoner might. If a person can be forced to serve and even to die, it is difficult to draw a sharp contrast between that person’s service and that of many slaves in the ancient world. (203)

We should also note that our idea of slavery likely does not match the slavery being described here. Especially within the United States, we tend to think of the kind of chattel slavery that was once practiced. The fact that it was essentially a publicly accepted human trafficking network and that the slaves were predominately black makes us rightly shudder that it would be our own history. However, the slavery being described here was quite different. Indeed, verse 16 plainly prescribes the death penalty to anyone who even participates in human trafficking, which condemns the form of slavery that was practiced in the United States.

It would be better if we thought of this slavery as indentured servitude. An Israelite, who was in debt, could offer himself as a slave. He would come under his master’s household, where he would receive food, shelter, and decent wages, which he gives fully to paying his debts since his basic needs were already met. Later laws (see Leviticus 25) made it clear that a slave could redeemed from his slavery at price. Yet with Israelite slaves, they were only to serve for seven years (whether their freedom came at the start or end of the seventh year is unclear). After that they were allowed to go free once more. Deuteronomy also clarifies that he could not be sent away empty-handed:

If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you let him go free from you, you shall not let him go empty-handed. You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress. As the LORD your God has blessed you, you shall give to him. You shall remember  that you were a salve in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today.

Deuteronomy 15:12-15

Philip Ryken makes a great conclusion from this:

God is gracious, and he wanted his people to treat one another with the same kind of grace they had received when they were delivered from Egypt and went out loaded with silver and gold (12:35, 36).

This proves that the Biblical form of slavery had a constructive purpose. it was for the benefit of the servant as well as the master. This is not the way slavery usually works. Ordinarily it is for the master’s advantage: He gets his work done at his slave’s expense. But the purpose of slavery in Israel was to train men and women to become productive members of society. The reason they had to become servants int he first place was because they were in debt, sometimes through their own negligence and sometimes to make restitution for a theft. In such cases their servitude was made necessary by their sin. But rather than being condemned to a life of perpetual poverty, they had chance to improve their situation. Slavery was God’s way of training irresponsible men to manage their own affairs. (660)

Of course, verse 3 says that if he was single entering slavery, then he must leave single or if married, his family shall be freed with him. But if his master provided a wife for him, the wife and children stayed with the master. How could such a law that divided a family possible be good? Ryken notes:

It is at least possible that this law actually was for the protection of the women and children. Remember that the husband and father in this case was a former debtor. If his servitude had served its purpose, he was now ready to become a productive member of the covenant community. Soon he would be able to buy his family’s freedom (see Leviticus 25:47-55), and they would all be united  under one roof–his roof. But if he had failed to learn his lesson, he would soon be back in debt, and this time his wife and children would also have to suffer the consequences. For the time being, then, the safest thing would be for them to remain under the care of their master. They were still a family, but the woman and her children would remain under their master’s household until their husband and father could take full responsibility for them in a God-honoring way. (661)

But if he loved his master, he could make a public declaration and become a permanent slave in his master’s household. Such a choice is almost unthinkable to us today, since individual autonomy is one of our highest societal virtues. However, at a time when each year’s food supply was never guaranteed, being a slave to wealthy master could lead to a far better life than one could even establish for himself. Thus, there were circumstances where it would have been more beneficial to be a slave than to be free.

That is also part of the idea behind verses 7-11. Why would a father ever sell his daughter into slavery? To give her the chance for a better life than he could give her. Being sold into a wealthy family meant that she could become a wife for the master himself or for one of his sons. If so, she must be given food, clothing, and the opportunities to produce offspring, or she must be treated as a daughter. The master also forbidden from selling her outside of Israel. If he no longer wanted her, she could be redeemed by her family or another household, and if she became his wife and he failed to give her three rights, she could go free for free.

All of these laws are ultimately to protect female slaves from being abused. We may scoff at verse 7’s statement that there was no seven-year time-limit on her slavery as there was with male slaves. But again, we should try to view these laws from the ancients’ perspective. A single-woman household unheard of in the ancient world because it would have been far too dangerous for her. It may be unthinkable for us today, but consider the story of Tamar and Amnon, where she tells Amnon that refusing to marry her after raping her was worse than the actual rape. The ancient world was a brutal place for everyone, and a woman was safest under the provision and protection of her father, husband, or master.

LEX TALIONIS // VERSES 12-32

The next set of laws could be called laws of retaliation when harm is inflicted against another person. Allow me to make a few brief comments before we focus upon the overall theme.

First, verses 12-14 make the distinction between what we now call murder and manslaughter. Intention is an important factor in determining how justice should be served. Intentional murder was always to be answered with the death of the murderer, but accidental manslaughter was distinguished. In Israel, cities of refuge would be established where it was illegal for the family of the dead person to exact their revenge.

Second, while there was mercy shown to the committer of manslaughter, none was shown to the person who assaulted or reviled his parents. Of course, both verse 15 and 17 are intensive. The first is a beating more than a striking, and the second would be an intentional curse that was likely followed by a refusal to care for the parents. Like the kidnapping, although these sins did not cause death, they were to be punished with death because they contributed directly to the corruption of society as a whole and since parents are the most immediate authority that God places within our lives, it is also a rejection of God’s authority as well.

Third, as everyone intuitively knows, verses 22-25 affirm that a baby within the womb is indeed alive and human. If anyone hit a pregnant woman and caused her to go into labor early, he would pay a fine, even if the baby and the mother made it through well. But if the baby or the mother were injured or even died, the penalty was to fit the damage. A person could, therefore, be executed for causing a miscarriage. Life for life.

Indeed, they lead to one of the most well-known statements in the Bible, which also happens to be the heart of these laws:

But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

This principle, which is the principle governing all the laws around it, is often called lex talionis, and we often think of it as instructing retaliation. Douglas Stuart notes:

Talion laws are easily misunderstood if taken literally. They usually do not mean what they sound like they are saying to the modern ear. No evidence exists that any judges in the ancient world ever actually required a literal application of talion law beyond the first of its terms, “life for life.” In cases of murder, the murderer was put to death as a “life for life” satisfaction of the law. But beyond that, there was no actual taking of someone’s eye in exchange for his having ruined the eye of another person, nor was a tooth knocked out of a person in exchange for a tooth knocked out of someone else by that person and so on through the “bruise for bruise” penalty. Instead, expressions like “eye for eye” were understood idiomatically to mean “a penalty that hurts the person who ruined someone else’s eye as much as he would be hurt if his own eye were actually ruined also.”… The goal of talion law was always a simple one: to see that full justice was done. Its unique wording conveyed to the ancient Israelites an important principle, namely, that someone who permanently injured another person ought to be fully punished in a way that really “hurt.” Israel was not to accept a system of law that could allow one person to continue crippled for life and let the person who caused the crippling to continue merrily on, simply a bit less wealthy than he had originally been. (493-494)

PROPERTY & RESTITUTION // VERSES 33-15

The final section of laws before us continues the principle of lex talionis but moves from bodily harm to the damage and destruction of property. The Eighth Commandment affirms by implication that God is not a communist. Even though we are all stewards of the gifts that God gives to us, in relation to one another we really do own things. Indeed, the beauty of the early church having all things in common is that they were doing so freely and willingly. It is same as how the Israelites will give in abundance to the tabernacle in the coming chapters. Where did their wealth come from, since they were slaves? They plundered the Egyptians of their wealth as God brought them out of Egypt. Thus, they would not have had their wealth without God’s hand, but He did truly give it to them, and they were free to do with it what they pleased.

Tony Merida summarizes these laws well, saying:

In each of these cases, the laws appear sensible. You had to respect one another’s property. Again, these laws were wonderful gifts because they showed people how to live in community, loving their neighbors as themselves. The laws also helped to solve disputes. Further, by demanding more than the value of the item, it deterred possible criminals. It also protected life–the life of the thief. As mentioned, in other cultures the authorities killed thieves. But God’s law placed primacy on life, not possessions. And the punishment fit the crime. If the thief could not pay off his debt, he was forced to work it off until the victim got what he deserved.

YOU HAVE HEARD IT SAID

In speaking of these laws of restitution and retaliation, the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount likely sprang to mind. In Matthew 5:38-42, Jesus said:

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

As with the other commands that Jesus referred to, Jesus is abolishing or even rewriting the law; rather, He is correcting interpreting the principle of the law with the authority of the one who wrote it.

A blow on the right cheek was much more than an injury. It was also an insult, because such a blow was struck with the back of the right hand. Most people would fight back. Some of them would justify it by saying, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” But according to Jesus, this is not what the law meant at all. The law was actually about making things right when we hurt someone else; it was not about getting what we have coming to us when someone else harms us.

Indeed, Jesus’ words are truly the ethics of the kingdom of God, for God’s holy nation of treasured possessions. He is teaching (and saying that the Old Testament was also teaching) that we should be quick to show mercy when harmed and quick to offer restitution when we have done harm. Would a community not thrive under those conditions?

Of course, Jesus is the great teacher who never asks anything of His disciples that He Himself did not practice, for He gave us the ultimate display of mercy, justice, and grace through the cross. By sinning against God, we reject the eternal life and joy that can only be found in Him, and by defying the Eternal One, we earn for ourselves an eternal punishment of death. Therefore, if God had chosen to send each of us to hell, His goodness and justice would never have been in question. Yet He chose to redeem us from that penalty, just as He redeemed Israel from their slavery in Egypt, and He did so through paying our debt Himself. Our cosmic treason against the Infinite King warranted an infinite death. Life for life. Yet Christ redeemed us by paying that debt Himself, by giving His life in exchange for ours.

Of course, we also find a marvelous picture of our salvation in Christ through the slavery laws that we have just studied. We are each like the irresponsible and sinful Hebrew who earned a mountain of debt far too great for us to pay. But we have come under the household of our Master, and He has paid our debt and made us His own. Yet the picture is gets even better. Ours is the story of Hosea and Gomer. We were all caught in the life of slavery and whoredom to our sins, but Christ has purchased our freedom with His own life and made us His own bride. Thus, we are slaves to Christ, but we are also now of one flesh with Him. He, our Beloved, is ours, and we are His.