Nor do the traditional commentaries waste much time trying to figure our the reasons for the sequence. Ten of the first eleven verses of the parasha deal with the protection of Hebrew slaves in a bold new spirit that practically eliminates a status that turns humans into chattel. The Torah seeks to prevent us from degrading members of the community who have fallen on hard times. 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.