Right off the bat, God begins stating His judgments. These are things decided already by the Divine Judge. This passage is the precedent for handling bond-servants from among your Covenant nation, as opposed to outright slaves. There is a different code for Gentile slaves, as we shall see later. So far as we know, no other national code or covenant offered such strong rights for any kind of slaves.
It was a common practice in the Ancient Near East to sell oneself into bondage to pay back a large debt, or for some other need of a large sum of money, or simply as a means to dealing with abject poverty. The term of service (the bond) for bond-servants was tied to the sabbatical cycle. They worked for six years and then became free.
His marital status returned to his former life upon release. Thus, a slave married before is still married. If he brought his family into the bond, he took them with him at the end of it. A single slave returns to the single life. Should his master offer, and he accept a slave wife (most likely a Gentile woman), she remains the property of the master, as do any children. He can always choose to stay with his slave family in service. In that case, a judge or priest is called to witness the ritual of permanent service: his earlobe (symbol of obedient listening) is “nailed” to the doorpost of the house he serves. He becomes a possession of the owner of that house, though still a covenant brother.
But a woman cannot sell herself into bondage. She can be sold by her father/guardian only, and then she has the legal status of a concubine. If her master actually takes her into his bed, and then regrets it for any reason, she can be sold back to her family or some other Hebrew household so that she remains protected by the Covenant. It’s rather like a divorce. He can’t just kick her out on the street, and he absolutely cannot sell her to a Gentile buyer. God will not permit Hebrew men to become sexual predators on poor girls.
If he buys a girl for his son, he has to treat her as he would a standard daughter-in-law. If any man takes an additional wife beside his concubine, she might not have full social standing as wife, but he cannot reduce her position in the household. She must retain the same food, clothing, and the same favorable treatment in daily living. In other words, her master cannot suddenly demote her to mere slavery.
Again, this is far better than the treatment bond-servants typically saw in other nations.
I appreciate how detailed you are in explaining the complexity of God’s order in the Hebrews’ lives. Each aspect of that life was carefully defined in terms of what, in God’s eyes, was right and good and proper. All of this ensured fairness and stability in each type of relationship.
Oh, that modern Western society had even an inkling of how improved their lives could be by even following the basic precepts under which the ancients lived.
I maintain that slavery wasn’t bad in itself. It’s how people survived. We moderns don’t like it because it’s so different than our conception of freedom. We have plenty of different kinds of modern slavery in state-backed usury (the Fed). It’s really little different than the slavery described above, as far as I can see, except in scale.