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Exodus requires that debt slaves be freed after six years of work, based on earlier ancient Near Eastern laws such as the Code of Hammurabi, which requires debt slaves to be freed after three years of work.
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Code of Hammurabi
Babylonian Legal Text
Ancient Near East
116 If the prisoner die in prison from blows or maltreatment, the master of the prisoner shall convict the merchant before the judge. If he was a free-born man, the son of the merchant shall be put to death; if it was a slave, he shall pay one-third of a mina of gold, and all that the master of the prisoner gave he shall forfeit 117 If any one fail to meet a claim for debt, and sell himself, his wife, his son, and daughter for money or give them away to forced labor: they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them, or the proprietor, and in the fourth year they shall be set free 118 If he give a male or female slave away for forced labor, and the merchant sublease them, or sell them for money, no objection can be raised
Date: 1750 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Exodus 21:2
Hebrew Bible
1 “These are the ordinances that you will set before them: 2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years, but in the seventh year he will go out free without paying anything. 3 If he came in by himself he will go out by himself; if he had a wife when he came in, then his wife will go out with him. 4 If his master gave him a wife, and she bore sons or daughters, the wife and the children will belong to her master, and he will go out by himself.
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Notes and References
"... The law about the male begins with a case that allows him to go free and ends with one that requires his permanent servitude; the law about the daughter begins with a case where she is permanently enslaved and ends with one where she goes free. This, however, accounts for only part of the creative character of these laws. As much as the structure, their content is equally a product of compositional imagination. As this chapter shows, the Covenant Code took the Law of Hammurabi 117 as the foundation for each of the main subdivisions of verses 2–11. But seeing a number of latent questions in that source law, it added rules derived mainly from other unrelated laws in Hammurabi in one case, learned from a law similar to one found in MAL A. The Covenant Code thereby created a novel series of laws on debt-slavery that is more comprehensive than what is found in Hammurabi’s legislation ..."
Wright, David P.
Inventing God's Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi
(p. 123) Oxford University Press, 2009
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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