Exodus 21:1-11 ▼

1 And these [are] the judgments which you set before them:

2 When you buy a Hebrew servant, he serves [for] six years, and in the seventh he goes out as a freeman for nothing;

3 if he comes in by himself, he goes out by himself; if he [is] owner of a wife, then his wife has gone out with him;

4 if his lord gives a wife to him, and she has borne sons or daughters to him—the wife and her children are her lord’s, and he goes out by himself.

5 And if the servant really says: I have loved my lord, my wife, and my sons—I do not go out free,

6 then his lord has brought him near to God, and has brought him near to the door, or to the doorpost, and his lord has bored his ear with an awl, and he has served him for all time.

7 And when a man sells his daughter for a handmaid, she does not go out according to the going out of the menservants;

8 if [it is] evil in the eyes of her lord, so that he has not betrothed her, then he has let her be ransomed; he has no power to sell her to a strange people, in his dealing treacherously with her.

9 And if he betroths her to his son, he does to her according to the right of daughters.

10 If he takes another [woman] for him, he does not withdraw her food, her covering, and her habitation;

11 and if he does not do these three for her, then she has gone out for nothing, without money.