1When there is a dispute between men, they shall approach the court of justice, and they shall judge them and find for the one in the right and against the one in the wrong. 2And it shall be, if the one in the wrong deserves blows, the judge shall make him lie down and have him struck before him, according to his wrongdoing in number. 3Forty blows he may strike him, he shall not go farther, lest he go on to strike him beyond these a great many blows, and your brother seem of no account in your eyes. 4You shall not muzzle an ox when it threshes. 5Should brothers dwell together and one of them die and have no son, the wife of the dead man shall not become wife outside to a stranger. Her brother-in-law shall come to bed with her and take her to him as wife, and carry out a brother-in-law’s duty toward her. 6And it shall be, the firstborn whom she bears shall be established in the name of his dead brother, that his name be not wiped out from Israel. 7And if the man does not want to wed his sister-in-law, his sister-in-law shall go up to the gate to the elders and say, “My brother-in-law has refused to establish a name for his brother, a name in Israel. He did not want to carry out a brother-in-law’s duty toward me.” 8And the elders of his town shall call to him and speak to him, and if he stands and says, “I do not want to wed her,” 9his sister-in-law shall approach him before the eyes of the elders and slip his sandal from his foot and spit in his face and speak out and say, “So shall be done to the man who will not build his brother’s house.” 10And his name shall be called in Israel: the House of the Slipped-off Sandal. 11Should men brawl together, a man and his brother, and the wife of one of them come forward to rescue her man from the hand of the one striking him, and she reach out her hand and seize his pudenda, 12you shall cut off her hand, your eye shall not spare her. 13You shall not have in your pouch different weight-stones, a big one and a small one. 14You shall not have in your house different ephah measures, a big one and a small one. 15A whole and honest weight-stone you shall have; a whole and honest ephah measure you shall have, so that you may enjoy length of days on the soil that the LORD your God is about to give you. 16For the abhorrence of the LORD your God is anyone who does all these things, who commits any fraud. 17Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you came out of Egypt, 18how he fell upon you on the way and cut down all the stragglers, with you famished and exhausted, and he did not fear God. 19And it shall be, when the LORD your God grants you respite from all your enemies around in the land that the LORD your God is about to give you in estate to take hold of it, you shall wipe out the remembrance of Amalek from under the heavens, you shall not forget.
CHAPTER 25 NOTES
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1. court of justice. The single Hebrew word mishpat can mean “law,” “judgment,” “justice,” “the institution or court of justice,” besides several non-judicial senses.
2. deserves blows. The corporal punishment would be either lashes or blows delivered with a rod or cane. Biblical law is reticent about what infractions merited this punishment, mentioning only the instance of a man who defames his wife (22:18).
3. Forty blows. Rabbinic law stipulates thirty-nine lashes in order to avert the possibility that the executor of the punishment might inadvertently exceed the limit of forty. It also stipulates that if the guilty person is in any way infirm or shows signs of losing physical control during the lashing, the number of blows shall be reduced accordingly.
a great many blows. Literally, “a multitudinous blow.”
4. You shall not muzzle an ox when it threshes. The humanitarian motive of this law is obvious. Threshing was done by oxen either with their hooves or pulling a threshing sledge. In either case, the ox is not to be prevented from nibbling during the work.
5. Should brothers dwell together. Although this might mean in the same extended household, the probable reference is to contiguous properties or properties in close proximity.
carry out a brother-in-law’s duty toward her. This is a single verb in the Hebrew weyibmah, derived from yabam, “brother-in-law.” The institution assumed here is the socalled levirate marriage (from the Latin levir, “brother-in-law”). The continuity provided by male offspring in this patrilineal society was the sole form of “immortality” a man could expect, which would also have the economic ramification of bequeathing one’s property to a son. A man who dies without having begotten a son is thus cut off, his “name wiped out from Israel.” His brother serves as a kind of proxy for the dead man, and the son he begets with the widow is to bear the name—that is, the patronymic—of the dead brother. The practice of the levirate marriage seems to have shifted at different points in the biblical period. In the Book of Ruth, “brother” is clearly extended to cover the nearest available kinsman, even a distant cousin.
6. established. The literal meaning of the verb is “to arise.”
8. if he stands. Some interpreters understand this ordinary verb of physical position to mean “persist” here.
9. slip his sandal from his foot. There are differing opinions about the symbolism of this gesture. Some understand it as a gesture of severance: as the widow removes the sandal, she removes herself from obligatory connection with the brother-in-law and is free to marry someone else. But calling his house the House of the Slipped-off Sandal clearly is a shaming act. Perhaps because only the indigent would go about barefoot, slipping off the man’s sandal in public is a ritual of disgrace (especially since the law seems to assume that he and his deceased brother are men who have property).
spit in his face. Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashi, and many modern commentators interpret this as “before him,” i.e., on the ground in front of him, which the Hebrew preposition could definitely mean. But a more shocking gesture of humiliation may be more in keeping with the harsh tenor of her declaration “So shall be done to the man . . .”
11. Should men brawl together. Ibn Ezra shrewdly identifies this as an antithetical echo of “Should brothers dwell together” (verse 5).
pudenda. The Hebrew term mevushim, like the Latinate English term, is derived from the root that means “shame.”
12. you shall cut off her hand. Once again, the draconian severity of this law led the rabbis to reinterpret it to mean monetary compensation. The law may register a vehement response to a breach of modesty on the part of the woman, but a Middle Assyrian parallel suggests that the case in mind is one where the woman inflicts serious injury on the man by seizing his testicles. If an impairment of reproductive function is involved, this would be grave, and would link this law to the concern for the continuation of man’s name in the levirate marriage.
13. weight-stones. The Hebrew says simply “stones,” but the meaning is unambiguous, and weight-stones were abundantly used for commercial transactions.
14. ephah measures. The Hebrew says simply “ephah,” a unit of dry measure equal to about 19 liters, though some think it might have been bigger.
17. Remember what Amalek did to you. It is not entirely clear why Amalek (compare Exodus 17:8–16) is singled out as the archenemy of Israel. In historical terms, the Amalekites, a seminomadic people of the Negeb and southern trans-Jordan region, carried out frequent and brutal marauding raids against Israelite settlements (see the story about the Amalekite raid against David’s town of Ziklag in 1 Samuel 30). Deuteronomy here offers an explanation for the opprobrium of Amalek not mentioned in Exodus—that the Amalekites attacked the Israelite stragglers, who would have been the old, the infirm, and women and children, and slaughtered them.
18. he fell upon you . . . and he did not fear God. This language suggests an ambush of the stragglers. S. D. Luzatto, the nineteenth-century Italian Hebrew exegete, proposes that this injunction is connected to the previous one about false weights and measures through the idea of deception.
19. when the LORD your God grants you respite from all your enemies. Historically, a campaign to wipe out the Amalekites was undertaken in the time of Hezekiah, in the late eighth century B.C.E.
you shall wipe out the remembrance of Amalek. The noun zekher, which is also used in the parallel verse in Exodus 17:14, means “name” but derives from the root meaning “remembrance.” Etymologically, a name is the remembrance a man leaves after him, and zekher, “remembrance,” is strongly linked with zakhar, “male.” (Compare the necessity of male offspring to prevent a name from being wiped out in the levirate marriage.) But it is important to retain the idea of remembering in translation because the writer is pointedly playing with “remembrance . . . do not forget.”