A prevalent misinterpretation views this verse as endorsing unlimited brutality or treating slaves as disposable property, ignoring that it mandates capital punishment for masters who kill their servants through beating, thus elevating slaves' lives to the same legal protection against homicide as free persons; another error assumes the Bible fully sanctions chattel slavery like the transatlantic trade, overlooking the passage's context in regulated servitude often tied to debt or war captives with pathways to freedom and humane limits on treatment.
Exodus 21:20
King James Version (1769)
20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.
Exodus 21:20 establishes a fundamental principle in Mosaic Law that a master who strikes his male or female servant with a rod causing immediate death must himself be put to death, affirming the inherent value of human life regardless of social status and prohibiting murder disguised as discipline, which marked a progressive protection for slaves compared to many ancient Near Eastern codes where killing one's slave often carried no penalty.