The following turns into a religious ramble. This particular knowledge set also tends to make people assume I'm Jewish. If I were, though, this would be considerably more detailed, as I would have studied enough to be able to point out exactly where everything is.
From page 1.
Biblical stories look mixed too. When the Israelites first conquered Canaan they took slaves, and some of the tribes living there tricked them into accepting them as slaves rather than kill them.
There are written injunctions among the laws not to enslave foreigners who visit Israel just because they are foreigners in Israel, not without some good reason. I don't recall any punishment listed for people who do it, the rule just says not to. Is it plausible that this might have happened a lot? The claim was that every 50 years all the slaves were supposed to be freed. If that was followed it would imply that the amount of credit offered to debtors would drop each year until the 50th year. When you can be enslaved for less than one year, you are worth much less than when you can go for 50 years if you live that long. But I don't know whether that custom was ever actually practiced. And anyway it would be only for Israelites who were enslaved for debts, and not for foreign slaves captured by the army or bought from foreigners.
Historically, no, the every 50 years thing wasn't practiced - it's not for no reason that they are repeatedly referred to as a 'stiff-necked people'. The laws in Torah and actual practices have been vastly different ever since it actually got written down.
Debts were supposed to be forgiven every 7 years, and after every 7th 7, the next year was where ALL slaves were freed, and all land that had been purchased or anything like that was returned to the original owner/their family. (Part of this was so that you wouldn't have one family end up with pretty well the whole country because another had fallen on hard times, or because they'd had a lot of daughters to pay dowry for rather than having sons that would've received it. The original layout of the country was, each tribe gets an area proportional to the number of people in it, and then they draw lots to see who gets which section - nobody lays claim to anything beforehand.)
Numerical significance of the 7 - 7 implies completion, and refers to Adonai. (lit. translation 'Lord' - but it's not the one that gets translated all in caps there.) 7 7s is... complete completion? (7 sets of 7 7s would imply the completest completion ever, though, because having something appear three times is like 'complete', 'completer' 'completest', or 'holy' 'holier' 'holiest' etc. etc.)
Add in, once they were actually in the holy land after the exodus, they were commanded to give 'the peace' to everyone. They weren't supposed to go out and conquer anything, but part of the covenant made between them and Adonai was 'if you turn away from me, there will be war, famine, death, etc.
Those that were in the land already when the israelites arrived, context in the original hebrew indicates they'd reached complete corruption by this point, and as such were cut out of the 'inheritance' of eternal life.
Oh, you mentioned not seeing any sort of punishment written for the violation of the law not to take slaves of foreigners as they entered the land. Anything without a specified punishment, the punishment is death. Eternal life is revoked, and only through the messiah can it be granted again. (A lot of the laws in there are ones that only ever apply if you've broken some other law, and have thus lost eternal life. Doing them was supposed to be an indication of repentance, submission to Adonai, etc. There are a lot less to keep if you never break any in the first place - and one of the requirements of the messiah prophecied there was that they would never break any in the first place.) Repeated offenses of certain things, punishment is death by execution or something similar, but for much of it, the law told the people not to pass judgment because it was Adonai's job.