In the Seventh He Shall Go Out Free: The First Law After Sinai
"Six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing." Of everything the Torah could address first after the Ten Commandments, this is what comes first: a hard limit on how long one Israelite can be held in another's service. For a people who had just left Egypt's bondage "with rigour" — service with no defined end — this law built a guaranteed exit into their own society. Centuries later, in the final days before Jerusalem's fall, the prophet Jeremiah would cite this exact law to explain why judgment was coming.
Six Years He Shall Serve, and in the Seventh He Shall Go Out Free
This is the very first case law in the Torah. Immediately after the Ten Commandments and the laws of the altar (Exodus 20), before any law about property, injury, or worship, Exodus 21 opens with a limit on how long one Israelite may hold another in servitude. Six years — then "he shall go out free for nothing." No purchase price, no further obligation, no negotiation. The cap is absolute, and it is the first thing Israel is told once the laws begin.
Placement is argument. Whatever else Israelite society would need to organize — property, agriculture, worship, courts — the Torah addresses the limits of servitude before any of it. A nation that had just left Egypt was being told, as close to the beginning as a law code can place something, that whatever economic hardship might lead one of its own members into another's service, that arrangement has a hard, built-in end.
Remember Egypt
The generation receiving this law had a very specific reference point for what servitude without a limit looked like. Exodus 1:14 describes Egypt's treatment of Israel: "they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour." There was no sixth year. No proclamation of release. No exit at all — only escalation, until Exodus 2:23 describes the people's cry going up to God.
Exodus 21:2 does not abolish the institution of servitude within Israel — someone in severe debt or poverty might still enter another's service, much as the bondwoman of Exodus 21:7 (see #123) did. But it draws a line Egypt never drew: six years, then free, automatically, without payment. The people who had just been delivered from a service "with rigour" and no end were commanded to build into their own society something Egypt had refused to give them — a guaranteed exit.
Zedekiah's Broken Proclamation
Centuries later, with Babylon's army at the gates of Jerusalem, King Zedekiah and the people made a covenant to free their Hebrew servants — explicitly invoking this law (Jeremiah 34:8-10). For a moment, Exodus 21:2 was honored, at national scale, in the middle of a crisis. And then Jeremiah 34:11 records what happened next: "they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids... to return, and brought them into subjection for servants and for handmaids."
Jeremiah's response cites the original law almost word for word — "at the end of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been sold unto thee... but your fathers hearkened not unto me" (Jeremiah 34:14). The indictment is not that this generation never knew the law, or even that they refused it outright — they proclaimed it, then reversed it. Jeremiah 34:17 makes the consequence explicit: "ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother... behold, I proclaim a liberty for you... to the sword, to the famine, and to the pestilence."
Key Figures
Study Questions
The people who had just escaped a bondage with no end were given, as one of their first laws, a guaranteed end to bondage — and centuries later, breaking that promise became part of Jeremiah's indictment of Jerusalem.
Open Exodus 21:2 in Torah Reader