Mishpatim

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Mishpatim ('Ordinances', Exodus 21:1-24:18) sets out a detailed body of civil and ritual law, on servants, damages, property, justice for the stranger, the sabbatical year and the festivals, and ends with the people accepting the covenant, saying 'we will do and we will hear.'

Mishpatim's opening laws on the Hebrew indentured servant, released after six years of service (Exodus 21:2), are read by commentators as placed deliberately at the head of the legal code immediately following the revelation at Sinai, a position rabbinic tradition reads as a pointed reminder that a people only just freed from Egyptian slavery must build a society that limits, rather than replicates, the institution of servitude even where it permits it under regulation. The portion's repeated instruction not to oppress the stranger, 'for you were strangers in the land of Egypt' (Exodus 22:20, 23:9), grounds one of the Torah's most frequently repeated commandments, appearing in some rabbinic counts more often than any other single instruction, in the community's own remembered experience of vulnerability rather than in abstract principle alone.

Mishpatim's civil law collection, on servants, injury, theft and property, has been compared since the nineteenth-century decipherment of cuneiform law codes to other ancient Near Eastern legal collections, above all the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which shares specific provisions such as the principle of 'an eye for an eye' (Exodus 21:24) in strikingly similar wording. Scholars studying the comparison also note real differences: Hammurabi's code sets penalties according to the social rank of victim and offender, while Mishpatim applies its core talionic principle without the same explicit stratification, and its opening laws address the release of an indentured servant rather than, as in several Near Eastern codes, beginning from property or state offences.

Source critics generally treat Mishpatim as an old, self-contained legal collection, sometimes called the Covenant Code, incorporated into the Exodus narrative rather than composed for it, on the strength of its distinct legal style compared to surrounding narrative material and to the later Priestly and Deuteronomic law collections elsewhere in the Torah. Traditional Jewish legal tradition instead treats all of these collections as a single unified law given at Sinai, and rabbinic literature draws extensively on Mishpatim as a primary source for civil law in the Talmud.