The servant blinded by his master
Exodus 21:20-27.
What leads up to it
These laws follow the Ten Commandments in Exodus and deal with injuries: a servant beaten to death, a pregnant woman struck in a fight, and the rule of equal measure, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth."
What it says
If a master strikes a servant, male or female, and destroys an eye, the servant goes free. The eye is the price of freedom. The next verse says the same of a tooth.
What it may tell us
Two things stand out. The law assumes masters did strike servants, and that eyes were lost that way. And it does not apply "eye for eye" to the master; instead the injured servant is set free. Whether that was more or less protection than a slave had under neighboring law codes is a question the reference shelf can help with, and the place-and-time section below takes it up.
From Brian
Open for Brian: What this passage says to someone who lives without sight.
Other voices
Open: other blind people and their families will be asked the same question, and their answers will appear here with their permission.
The place and the time
What the old books and the archaeologists can add. Each paragraph names its source.
The nearest comparison is Hammurabi's code, written in Babylon some five centuries before Moses. Its rule for an eye lost between equals is "If a man has caused the loss of a gentleman's eye, his eye one shall cause to be lost." But the penalty changes with the rank of the victim: for a poor man's eye, one mina of silver; for the eye of a gentleman's servant, half the servant's price. Teeth follow the same scale. Johns's text does not say who received the money for a servant's eye; the loss is priced, not freed.
Source: The Code of Hammurabi, translated by C. H. W. Johns (1903), sections 196 to 201; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Hammurabi."
Exodus 21:26 answers the same case differently: the servant goes free. Matthew Henry, writing in 1706, saw two purposes in that. It deterred a master, who would lose the servant's labor, and it gave an abused servant liberty to set against the pain. Smith's dictionary reads it the same way, as a limit on the master's power over the servant's body.
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Exodus 21; Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entries "Law of Moses" and "Slave."
The 1915 encyclopedia, in an article by the Assyriologist Arthur Ungnad, judged that the parallels between Exodus and Hammurabi are not accidental, but that Israel's laws were not copied from Babylon's either: "numerous marked divergences also exist." The servant's freedom is one of them.
Source: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Hammurabi."
By the first century, Josephus says, "eye for eye" among free people had become a matter of compensation: the offender suffered the same loss "unless he that is maimed will accept of money instead of it," and the injured person judged the value. Later rabbis argued against a literal eye for an eye partly because it could not be applied to a blind offender, and the Law's penalties had to work for everyone.
Source: Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book IV, chapter 8; Wikipedia, "Eye for an eye," revision of 2 October 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), citing Bava Kamma 83b-84a.
A side note from the same Babylonian code: it sets fees and penalties for eye surgery. A doctor who opens an abscess of the eye with a bronze lancet and cures it is paid ten shekels; if the patient loses the eye, the doctor loses his hands, or, if the patient is a poor man's slave, pays half the slave's price. Eyes were already being operated on, and sight lost on the table had a price.
Source: The Code of Hammurabi, translated by C. H. W. Johns (1903), sections 215 to 220.
The passage
Exodus 21:20-27
20 If a man strikes his manservant or maidservant with a rod, and the servant dies by his hand, he shall surely be punished.
21 However, if the servant gets up after a day or two, the owner shall not be punished, since the servant is his property.
22 If men who are fighting strike a pregnant woman and her child is born prematurely, but there is no further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband demands and as the court allows.
23 But if a serious injury results, then you must require a life for a life—
24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
25 burn for burn, wound for wound, and stripe for stripe.
26 If a man strikes and blinds the eye of his manservant or maidservant, he must let the servant go free as compensation for the eye.
27 And if he knocks out the tooth of his manservant or maidservant, he must let the servant go free as compensation for the tooth.