Exodus 21:7-13 Is Not about Divorce

Many advocates of divorce via abandonment attempt to argue from Exodus 21:7-13 that God commands divorce in the case of abandonment. Here we have another casuistic law, of course, that seeks to do damage control for the victim. However, what is being commanded has nothing to do with divorce. This text is simply being misread.

“If a man sells his daughter as a female servant, she will not go out as the male servants do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to a foreign nation, because he has dealt deceitfully with her. If he designated her for his son, then he will deal with her according to the customary rights of daughters. If he takes another wife, he must not diminish the first one’s food, her clothing, or her marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three things, then she will go out free, without paying money."

First, even if one granted that this was telling a slave girl she could divorce her master husband (something not permitted in Israelite law), this text says nothing about remarriage. Second to this, however, the law does not prescribe divorce at all. In fact, it condemns it with a punishment.

These are actually a series of laws that deal with what to do with a slave girl in various situations. The first law is that if her master is not pleased with her, he must allow her to be redeemed (presumably by her father) instead of selling her to someone else.

The second law has to do with how he must treat her if he gives her to his son. 

The third law, and the one taken out of context by divorce adovocates, is that if he takes away her food, clothing, and marital rights, she is to be set free without owing anymore debt or without needing to pay any money for the price of a slave.

In other words, the man has done a wicked thing in the protasis (we might call this the "clause of injustice"), where a crime is being committed against an individual, people, or land. He has essentially divorced his wife, but now wants to keep her in his household as a slave still, since she was originally his slave girl. God does not permit this. If he has divorced/abandoned her in terms of the marriage, then he has no more rights over her as a slave master. She is no longer a slave and is free to go.

In other words, the command is that she is free in terms of being a slave. The wicked man has already divorced her. This is not a command for her to divorce him (that's not even a possibility in Israelite law). It is a command that she is to be set free from slavery if he has abandoned their marriage, which is what those three things that she is being deprived of describe.

There is no comment that his divorcing her is acceptable. Everything in the text indicates that it is not. Hence, ironically, this law protects the once slave-girl, now wife, from divorce, and punishes divorce by causing the master to lose his slave as well. 

Either way, this is a slavery law concerning what to do with a slave girl in the case that she is married and then divorced by a man who still wants to keep her as his slave. He can't.