To lift the Torah's legal corpus out of its narrative framework is to sunder the connection between law and life. The sense of humanity which inspires the Torah's reform of slavery is driven by the experience in Egypt. Oppression deepens Israel's conception of justice. A kingdom of priests cannot be built on the loose soil of ethical speculation, but only on the bedrock of protracted suffering. The opening section of this first legal code of the Torah points back to the ordeal which formed Israel's moral sensibility.
Compassion flows from knowing pain.
And the traces of that transforming knowledge abound in the Torah's legal sections. Though slaves are indeed the property of their owners, the law intervenes to protect them against murder and injury. According to Bible scholar Nahum Sarna these restrictions on the freedom of action of slave owners have no parallel in the legal literature of the ancient Near East, and again I feel the weight of Israel's bondage behind these laws. Similarly, the Egyptian experience prompts concern for the stranger, the non-ethnic resident. Not once, but twice does our parasha warn against abusing the vulnerable non-Israelite in our midst, and each time the admonition is anchored in the past.