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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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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Code of Hammurabi
Babylonian Legal Text
Ancient Near East
116 If the prisoner dies in prison from blows or mistreatment, the prisoner's master shall convict the merchant before the judge. If the prisoner was free-born, the merchant's son shall be put to death; if he was a slave, the merchant shall pay one-third of a mina of gold, and he shall forfeit everything the prisoner's master gave him. 117 If anyone fails to pay a debt and sells himself, his wife, his son, and his daughter for money, or gives them into forced labor, they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them or holds them, and in the fourth year they shall be set free. 118 If he gives a male or female slave into forced labor, and the merchant subleases or sells them, no objection can be raised.
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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