“If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself.”
If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free. This provision is the difficult flipside of verse 3: if the master provided the wife, the family produced within the master's household belongs to the master. The law is not endorsing this arrangement as ideal but regulating a practice that existed. The servant who accepted a master-provided wife did so knowing the terms. Galatians 4:22–24 uses the allegory of two sons — one born of the slave woman and one of the free woman — to illustrate the difference between covenant bondage and covenant freedom. The legal category of children born within the master's household becomes the raw material for Paul's theological argument about two covenants.
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