Exodus 21:7-11 Protection for Female Servants

7 “When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. 8 If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. 9 If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. 10 If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. 11 And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.

Critics try to get a lot of mileage out of verse 7 but by assuming that she must remain a servant for life; but the phrase "she shall not go out as the male slaves do", means the opposite of what they assume. She gets more protection than males do, not less. 

Exodus 21:7-11 should be understood as laws to protect the female servant from abuse and neglect from the employer’s obligation to her (Ryken, Exodus, 702).

In verse 7 we see the scenario where “a man sells his daughter as a female slave." Why would someone sell their family member, let alone a daughter, to be a slave in the first place? This might be a situation of grave financial distress. In a society that is heavily agricultural back then, we can imagine if a husband gets injured, he puts his family in peril with survival. He might be having her be a servant to ensure she eats. He might have her be an indentured servant to have a better life and chance for a better future (Garrett, Exodus, 498). Of course, not every family would be a good host for the girl, so there needs to be discernment and wisdom on the part of the girl’s own family of which family their daughter will go out to work for.

Verse 8 does not say that women had no way to get out of service. A better translation of v. 8 would be: If her boss does not like her, then he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners.

Verse 9 deals with a scenario that’s the opposite of verse 8, where the master wants her to marry his son because that’s how pleased he is with her. Here, normal protocols of sons marrying daughters apply, even if she is a servant. Just because she works for a specific family does not mean she does not have the regular process of her family and his family to discuss marriage matters. Nor is she automatically made into a wife just because she’s a servant of the family.

Verse 10 protects the servant-turn-wife in the circumstances when she is married, but it turns out there are marriage difficulties. This unhappy circumstances are “If he takes to himself another woman” (v.10a). Again, this is stating the circumstances, it is not approving the act on the husband’s part. Whether the marriage goes well or goes badly, the husband has obligations towards her, for verse 10b states “he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights.”

Verse11 makes clear that women had no automatic right to get out of marriage after a period of years—that is, that unlike service, marriage was not a term-limited matter but rather a commitment for life. (But this was true for non-servants as well) This law assumes the payment to a head of a family of a combined contract labor and bride price, which would have been in all likelihood a larger sum of money than either payment separately. 

These issues mentioned boil down to his obligation to her in regard to survival. And the obligation should not be low quality provisions; literally the word food in verse 10 in the Hebrew is “meats” (Ryken, Exodus, 703). Bread is the usual term in Hebrew to convey “food.” In an ancient agricultural society that doesn’t necessarily eat meat as frequently as we do today in the West, it shows that this isn’t just low quality provisions he’s to give her.

What if the husband fails at those obligations? Verse 11 states, “she shall go free for nothing, without payment of money.” The husband and his family cannot invoke the card of her being formerly a slave, and therefore she’s obligated to stay and work for them. This is where the normal protocols of marriage is important, mentioned in verse 9. In the instance where she has the right to leave her husband under the conditions of verse 10 and 11, since there is the normal customs of marriage back then, she can go back to her family who have the dowry from the husband and thereby she can survive. Recall that back then there were fewer industries than there are now and in a heavily agricultural society there’s few jobs a widow can do, so dowry was an important custom back then to protect the woman.