1A man shall not wed his father’s wife, and he shall not uncover his father’s skirt. 2No one with crushed testes or lopped member shall come into the LORD’s assembly. 3No misbegotten shall come into the LORD’s assembly. Even his tenth generation shall not come into the LORD’s assembly. 4No Ammonite nor Moabite shall come into the LORD’s assembly. Even his tenth generation shall not come into the LORD’s assembly ever. 5Because they did not greet you with bread and water on the way when you came out of Egypt, and for their hiring against you Balaam son of Beor from Aram Naharaim to curse you. 6But the LORD your God did not want to listen to Balaam, and the LORD your God turned the curse into blessing for you, for the LORD your God loves you. 7You shall not seek their well-being and their good all your days, forever. 8You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a sojourner in his land. 9The sons that are born to them, their third generation may come into the LORD’s assembly.
10When you sally forth in a camp against your enemy, you shall keep yourself from every evil thing. 11Should there be among you a man who is not clean through nocturnal emission, he shall go outside the camp and not come into the camp. 12And it shall be, toward evening, he shall bathe in water and as the sun sets he may come inside the camp. 13And you shall have a marker outside the camp and shall go there outside. 14And you shall have a spike together with your battle gear, and it shall be, when you sit outside, you shall dig with it and go back and cover your excrement. 15For the LORD your God walks about in the midst of your camp to rescue you and to give your enemies before you, and your camp shall be holy, that He should not see among you anything shamefully exposed and turn back from you.
16You shall not hand over to his master a slave who escapes to you from his master. 17With you he shall stay, in your midst, in the place that he chooses within one of your gates wherever is good for him. You shall not mistreat him. 18There shall be no cult-harlot from the daughters of Israel, and there shall be no cult-catamite from the sons of Israel. 19You shall not bring a whore’s pay nor a dog’s price to the house of the LORD your God for any votive offering, for both of them are the abhorrence of the LORD your God. 20You shall not exact interest from your brother, interest of silver, interest of food, or interest of anything that will bear interest. 21From the stranger you may exact interest but from your brother you shall not exact interest, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all that your hand reaches on the land to which you are coming to take hold of it. 22Should you make a vow to the LORD your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the LORD your God will surely require it of you and there would be an offense in you. 23And should you refrain from making a vow, there will be no offense in you. 24The utterance of your lips you shall keep, and you shall do as you have vowed to the LORD your God, the freewill gift that you spoke with your mouth. 25Should you come into your fellow man’s vineyard, you may eat grapes as much as you crave—to your fill—but you shall not put them in your pouch. 26Should you come into your fellow man’s standing grain, you may pluck tender ears with your hand but you shall not wield a sickle on your fellow man’s standing grain.
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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1. his father’s wife. Since the term “wed” could not be used for a man’s mother or for a woman currently married to the man’s father, the phrase would have to mean his father’s widow (who might be fairly young, in light of the early age at which girls were married off) or a woman divorced from his father.
he shall not uncover his father’s skirt. What is involved is taboo by metonymic contamination: a man should not come in contact with the female nakedness that was once in conjugal contact with his own father’s nakedness. David Cohen-Zemach interestingly detects here an allusion to Ham’s seeing his father Noah’s nakedness (Genesis 9:22), Ham being the father of Canaan, the eponymous progenitor of the Canaanite peoples. What closely follows (verse 4) is a prohibition against ever accepting the Moabites and the Ammonites, two peoples purportedly engendered out of incestuous union with a father, into the Israelite community.
2. crushed testes or lopped member. This prohibition may simply express a vehement rejection of both forms of castration, in fact fairly commonly practiced in the ancient Near East. But the law as it is formulated also excludes from the assembly a man who is sexually mutilated through some accident. In this patriarchal culture, the integrity of the body is strongly connected with the integrity of the capacity for fatherhood. The prohibition, then, is thematically related to the immediately preceding prohibition against uncovering one’s father’s skirt, both expressing a horror of violation of the body of the father.
3. misbegotten. The Hebrew mamzer (etymology uncertain) later comes to mean “bastard,” but the convincing consensus of both traditional and modern commentators is that it refers to the offspring of a taboo, or incestuous, union.
4. Ammonite nor Moabite. It is not entirely clear why these two peoples should be permanently excluded for their hostility toward the Israelites approaching Canaan, whereas the Edomites, who were scarcely more friendly, and the Egyptians, who wanted to murder the entire population of Hebrew male infants, are to be accepted in the community. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Boaz married a Moabite woman, Ruth, who then became progenitrix of David’s royal line. (Abraham ibn Ezra’s contention that the ban is against Moabite men, not women, seems strained.) One must conclude that as historical circumstances shifted, attitudes in ancient Israel toward the sundry neighboring peoples also changed, and these changes are reflected in the inconsistencies of the texts.
shall not come into the LORD’s assembly. Jeffrey H. Tigay argues persuasively that the assembly is primarily a civic concept, roughly analogous to the polis among the Greeks. To come into the assembly, then, means to become a naturalized citizen. That status, of course, would also have entailed worship of the God of Israel.
11. not clean through nocturnal emission. This cluster of regulations about remaining in a state of purity in the military camp is predicated on the notion that “the LORD your God walks about in the midst of your camp” (verse 15), acting as guarantor of victory. Soldiers on a campaign at least sometimes took upon themselves a vow of sexual abstinence for the duration of the fighting, as one sees in the David story (1 Samuel 21:5–6), and the ritual impurity imparted by an involuntary emission of semen is related to that practice.
13. a marker. The Hebrew yad (primary meaning, “hand”) also means “monument” or “marker.” The common claim that here the sense is “place” stands on scanty philological grounds.
14. a spike. The Hebrew yated usually means “tent peg.”
battle gear. The rare term ʾazen is probably an Aramaizing form of zayin, “weapon.”
15. shamefully exposed. The Hebrew is literally “nakedness of a thing,” but the word for “nakedness,” ʿerwah, is specifically the term for prohibited sexual nakedness, that which should never be exposed, and so carries a strong connotation of shame.
16. You shall not hand over to his master a slave. The scholarly consensus is that this injunction to offer asylum to runaway slaves (an unusual law in the ancient world) refers to foreign slaves. Israelite slaves, who were in essence indentured servants, would have been freed after six years.
18. cult-harlot . . . cult-catamite. The precise meaning of these two terms, qedeshah and qadesh, is disputed. There is no clear-cut evidence that ritual prostitution was practiced in the ancient Near East, although it remains an undeniable possibility. (Ritual prostitution was known in nearby Asia Minor, the original homeland of the Hittites who often pass through the biblical scene.) Exceptionally, the female qedeshah is presented here before the male qadesh, suggesting she was the more familiar type. The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 makes it clear that qedeshah was some sort of more refined or dignified designation for a prostitute: Judah takes Tamar for a “whore” (zonah); Hirah his emissary then refers to her more decorously as a qedeshah. Since the root means “sacred,” it is a reasonable inference that the qedeshah was either a woman who prostituted herself as part of the cult (in that case, a fertility cult) or a prostitute working near the site of a sanctuary who devoted part of her professional income to the sanctuary. Since the pilgrim obligation to participate in the temple service was laid upon the males, the qadesh would in all likelihood have been a homosexual prostitute, as the translation “cult-catamite” is meant to indicate.
19. a whore’s pay nor a dog’s price. It is not clear whether the second of these phrases refers literally to what is gained by selling or bartering a dog or whether (perhaps more probably, because dogs had limited economic value in this society) “dog” is a contemptuous term for the qadesh. Dogs, we should recall, were despised in ancient Hebrew culture, thought of chiefly as unpleasant scavengers. They were not kept as pets and may not have been used for hunting or shepherding.
21. From the stranger you may exact interest but from your brother you shall not exact interest. The prohibition against interest (the term, at least etymologically, means “bite”) is predicated on an agrarian society of “brothers” in which loans are extended as a form of temporary charity. The ban may not have included properly mercantile loans, and it was not generally applied as Israelite society became more fully urbanized. Foreigners can be required to pay interest because the paradigmatic case would be foreign merchants traveling among the Israelites for business purposes.
23. should you refrain from making a vow. The vow is a “freewill gift,” and no one is under any obligation to make such a vow. But should a person in fact undertake a vow, he is strictly responsible to fulfill it promptly.
25. Should you come into your fellow man’s vineyard. This is by no means a country crisscrossed with highways, and thus it would often have been necessary to pass through someone’s vineyard or field on a narrow path in order to reach one’s destination.
26. you may pluck tender ears. The Hebrew melilot is derived from a verbal stem that means to rub between the fingers and is distinct from shibolim, “mature ears of grain.” The melilot (like the grapes) are thus a kind of available snack for the hungry pedestrian, but neither ears nor grapes are to be the object of actual harvesting, by wielding a sickle or filling a pouch.