16:18 You must appoint judges and civil servants 1 for each tribe in all your villages 2 that the Lord your God is giving you, and they must judge the people fairly. 3 16:19 You must not pervert justice or show favor. Do not take a bribe, for bribes blind the eyes of the wise and distort 4 the words of the righteous. 5 16:20 You must pursue justice alone 6 so that you may live and inherit the land the Lord your God is giving you.
16:21 You must not plant any kind of tree as a sacred Asherah pole 7 near the altar of the Lord your God which you build for yourself. 16:22 You must not erect a sacred pillar, 8 a thing the Lord your God detests. 17:1 You must not sacrifice to him 9 a bull or sheep that has a blemish or any other defect, because that is considered offensive 10 to the Lord your God. 17:2 Suppose a man or woman is discovered among you – in one of your villages 11 that the Lord your God is giving you – who sins before the Lord your God 12 and breaks his covenant 17:3 by serving other gods and worshiping them – the sun, 13 moon, or any other heavenly bodies which I have not permitted you to worship. 14 17:4 When it is reported to you and you hear about it, you must investigate carefully. If it is indeed true that such a disgraceful thing 15 is being done in Israel, 17:5 you must bring to your city gates 16 that man or woman who has done this wicked thing – that very man or woman – and you must stone that person to death. 17 17:6 At the testimony of two or three witnesses they must be executed. They cannot be put to death on the testimony of only one witness. 17:7 The witnesses 18 must be first to begin the execution, and then all the people 19 are to join in afterward. In this way you will purge evil from among you.
17:8 If a matter is too difficult for you to judge – bloodshed, 20 legal claim, 21 or assault 22 – matters of controversy in your villages 23 – you must leave there and go up to the place the Lord your God chooses. 24 17:9 You will go to the Levitical priests and the judge in office in those days and seek a solution; they will render a verdict. 17:10 You must then do as they have determined at that place the Lord chooses. Be careful to do just as you are taught. 17:11 You must do what you are instructed, and the verdict they pronounce to you, without fail. Do not deviate right or left from what they tell you. 17:12 The person who pays no attention 25 to the priest currently serving the Lord your God there, or to the verdict – that person must die, so that you may purge evil from Israel. 17:13 Then all the people will hear and be afraid, and not be so presumptuous again.
17:14 When you come to the land the Lord your God is giving you and take it over and live in it and then say, “I will select a king like all the nations surrounding me,” 17:15 you must select without fail 26 a king whom the Lord your God chooses. From among your fellow citizens 27 you must appoint a king – you may not designate a foreigner who is not one of your fellow Israelites. 28 17:16 Moreover, he must not accumulate horses for himself or allow the people to return to Egypt to do so, 29 for the Lord has said you must never again return that way. 17:17 Furthermore, he must not marry many 30 wives lest his affections turn aside, and he must not accumulate much silver and gold. 17:18 When he sits on his royal throne he must make a copy of this law 31 on a scroll 32 given to him by the Levitical priests. 17:19 It must be with him constantly and he must read it as long as he lives, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and observe all the words of this law and these statutes and carry them out. 17:20 Then he will not exalt himself above his fellow citizens or turn from the commandments to the right or left, and he and his descendants will enjoy many years ruling over his kingdom 33 in Israel.
18:1 The Levitical priests 34 – indeed, the entire tribe of Levi – will have no allotment or inheritance with Israel; they may eat the burnt offerings of the Lord and of his inheritance. 35 18:2 They 36 will have no inheritance in the midst of their fellow Israelites; 37 the Lord alone is their inheritance, just as he had told them. 18:3 This shall be the priests’ fair allotment 38 from the people who offer sacrifices, whether bull or sheep – they must give to the priest the shoulder, the jowls, and the stomach. 18:4 You must give them the best of your 39 grain, new wine, and olive oil, as well as the best of your wool when you shear your flocks. 18:5 For the Lord your God has chosen them and their sons from all your tribes to stand 40 and serve in his name 41 permanently. 18:6 Suppose a Levite comes by his own free will 42 from one of your villages, from any part of Israel where he is living, 43 to the place the Lord chooses 18:7 and serves in the name of the Lord his God like his fellow Levites who stand there before the Lord. 18:8 He must eat the same share they do, despite any profits he may gain from the sale of his family’s inheritance. 44
18:9 When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, you must not learn the abhorrent practices of those nations. 18:10 There must never be found among you anyone who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, 45 anyone who practices divination, 46 an omen reader, 47 a soothsayer, 48 a sorcerer, 49 18:11 one who casts spells, 50 one who conjures up spirits, 51 a practitioner of the occult, 52 or a necromancer. 53 18:12 Whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord and because of these detestable things 54 the Lord your God is about to drive them out 55 from before you. 18:13 You must be blameless before the Lord your God. 18:14 Those nations that you are about to dispossess listen to omen readers and diviners, but the Lord your God has not given you permission to do such things.
18:15 The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you – from your fellow Israelites; 56 you must listen to him. 18:16 This accords with what happened at Horeb in the day of the assembly. You asked the Lord your God: “Please do not make us hear the voice of the Lord our 57 God any more or see this great fire any more lest we die.” 18:17 The Lord then said to me, “What they have said is good. 18:18 I will raise up a prophet like you for them from among their fellow Israelites. I will put my words in his mouth and he will speak to them whatever I command. 18:19 I will personally hold responsible 58 anyone who then pays no attention to the words that prophet 59 speaks in my name.
18:20 “But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not authorized 60 him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die. 18:21 Now if you say to yourselves, 61 ‘How can we tell that a message is not from the Lord?’ 62 – 18:22 whenever a prophet speaks in my 63 name and the prediction 64 is not fulfilled, 65 then I have 66 not spoken it; 67 the prophet has presumed to speak it, so you need not fear him.”
19:1 When the Lord your God destroys the nations whose land he 68 is about to give you and you dispossess them and settle in their cities and houses, 19:2 you must set apart for yourselves three cities 69 in the middle of your land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession. 19:3 You shall build a roadway and divide into thirds the whole extent 70 of your land that the Lord your God is providing as your inheritance; anyone who kills another person should flee to the closest of these cities. 19:4 Now this is the law pertaining to one who flees there in order to live, 71 if he has accidentally killed another 72 without hating him at the time of the accident. 73 19:5 Suppose he goes with someone else 74 to the forest to cut wood and when he raises the ax 75 to cut the tree, the ax head flies loose 76 from the handle and strikes 77 his fellow worker 78 so hard that he dies. The person responsible 79 may then flee to one of these cities to save himself. 80 19:6 Otherwise the blood avenger will chase after the killer in the heat of his anger, eventually overtake him, 81 and kill him, 82 though this is not a capital case 83 since he did not hate him at the time of the accident. 19:7 Therefore, I am commanding you to set apart for yourselves three cities. 19:8 If the Lord your God enlarges your borders as he promised your ancestors 84 and gives you all the land he pledged to them, 85 19:9 and then you are careful to observe all these commandments 86 I am giving 87 you today (namely, to love the Lord your God and to always walk in his ways), then you must add three more cities 88 to these three. 19:10 You must not shed innocent blood 89 in your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, for that would make you guilty. 90 19:11 However, suppose a person hates someone else 91 and stalks him, attacks him, kills him, 92 and then flees to one of these cities. 19:12 The elders of his own city must send for him and remove him from there to deliver him over to the blood avenger 93 to die. 19:13 You must not pity him, but purge out the blood of the innocent 94 from Israel, so that it may go well with you.
19:14 You must not encroach on your neighbor’s property, 95 which will have been defined 96 in the inheritance you will obtain in the land the Lord your God is giving you. 97
19:15 A single witness may not testify 98 against another person for any trespass or sin that he commits. A matter may be legally established 99 only on the testimony of two or three witnesses. 19:16 If a false 100 witness testifies against another person and accuses him of a crime, 101 19:17 then both parties to the controversy must stand before the Lord, that is, before the priests and judges 102 who will be in office in those days. 19:18 The judges will thoroughly investigate the matter, and if the witness should prove to be false and to have given false testimony against the accused, 103 19:19 you must do to him what he had intended to do to the accused. In this way you will purge 104 evil from among you. 19:20 The rest of the people will hear and become afraid to keep doing such evil among you. 19:21 You must not show pity; the principle will be a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, and a foot for a foot. 105
20:1 When you go to war against your enemies and see chariotry 106 and troops 107 who outnumber you, do not be afraid of them, for the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, is with you. 20:2 As you move forward for battle, the priest 108 will approach and say to the soldiers, 109 20:3 “Listen, Israel! Today you are moving forward to do battle with your enemies. Do not be fainthearted. Do not fear and tremble or be terrified because of them, 20:4 for the Lord your God goes with you to fight on your behalf against your enemies to give you victory.” 110 20:5 Moreover, the officers are to say to the troops, 111 “Who among you 112 has built a new house and not dedicated 113 it? He may go home, lest he die in battle and someone else 114 dedicate it. 20:6 Or who among you has planted a vineyard and not benefited from it? He may go home, lest he die in battle and someone else benefit from it. 20:7 Or who among you 115 has become engaged to a woman but has not married her? He may go home, lest he die in battle and someone else marry her.” 20:8 In addition, the officers are to say to the troops, “Who among you is afraid and fainthearted? He may go home so that he will not make his fellow soldier’s 116 heart as fearful 117 as his own.” 20:9 Then, when the officers have finished speaking, 118 they must appoint unit commanders 119 to lead the troops.
20:10 When you approach a city to wage war against it, offer it terms of peace. 20:11 If it accepts your terms 120 and submits to you, all the people found in it will become your slaves. 121 20:12 If it does not accept terms of peace but makes war with you, then you are to lay siege to it. 20:13 The Lord your God will deliver it over to you 122 and you must kill every single male by the sword. 20:14 However, the women, little children, cattle, and anything else in the city – all its plunder – you may take for yourselves as spoil. You may take from your enemies the plunder that the Lord your God has given you. 20:15 This is how you are to deal with all those cities located far from you, those that do not belong to these nearby nations.
20:16 As for the cities of these peoples that 123 the Lord your God is going to give you as an inheritance, you must not allow a single living thing 124 to survive. 20:17 Instead you must utterly annihilate them 125 – the Hittites, 126 Amorites, 127 Canaanites, 128 Perizzites, 129 Hivites, 130 and Jebusites 131 – just as the Lord your God has commanded you, 20:18 so that they cannot teach you all the abhorrent ways they worship 132 their gods, causing you to sin against the Lord your God. 20:19 If you besiege a city for a long time while attempting to capture it, 133 you must not chop down its trees, 134 for you may eat fruit 135 from them and should not cut them down. A tree in the field is not human that you should besiege it! 136 20:20 However, you may chop down any tree you know is not suitable for food, 137 and you may use it to build siege works 138 against the city that is making war with you until that city falls.
21:1 If a homicide victim 139 should be found lying in a field in the land the Lord your God is giving you, 140 and no one knows who killed 141 him, 21:2 your elders and judges must go out and measure how far it is to the cities in the vicinity of the corpse. 142 21:3 Then the elders of the city nearest to the corpse 143 must take from the herd a heifer that has not been worked – that has never pulled with the yoke – 21:4 and bring the heifer down to a wadi with flowing water, 144 to a valley that is neither plowed nor sown. 145 There at the wadi they are to break the heifer’s neck. 21:5 Then the Levitical priests 146 will approach (for the Lord your God has chosen them to serve him and to pronounce blessings in his name, 147 and to decide 148 every judicial verdict 149 ) 21:6 and all the elders of that city nearest the corpse 150 must wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley. 151 21:7 Then they must proclaim, “Our hands have not spilled this blood, nor have we 152 witnessed the crime. 153 21:8 Do not blame 154 your people Israel whom you redeemed, O Lord, and do not hold them accountable for the bloodshed of an innocent person.” 155 Then atonement will be made for the bloodshed. 21:9 In this manner you will purge out the guilt of innocent blood from among you, for you must do what is right before 156 the Lord.