Deuteronomy 25
Do Not Muzzle the Ox That Treads the Grain
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Limits on Corporal Punishment
25:1If men have a dispute and come for judgment, the judges shall judge, vindicating the righteous and condemning the impious.
25:2If the impious man deserves lashes, you shall seat him before the judges, and they shall scourge him before them with a counted number proportionate to his impiety.
25:3They shall give him forty lashes, but no more. If they add further lashes beyond these, your brother will be disgraced before you.
The Working Ox
25:4Do not muzzle an ox while it threshes.
Levirate Marriage and Family Legacy
25:5If brothers live together and one dies without offspring, the dead man’s wife shall not marry outside to a man who is not a close relative. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, take her as his wife, and live with her as husband.
25:6The child she bears shall be established under the deceased man’s name, so that his name is not erased from Israel.
25:7If the man does not wish to take his brother’s wife, she shall go up to the council of elders at the gate and say: My husband’s brother will not raise up his brother’s name in Israel; my husband’s brother was unwilling.
25:8The council of elders of his city shall summon him and speak to him. If he stands and says, I do not wish to take her,
25:9his brother’s wife shall approach before the council of elders, remove one sandal from his foot, and spit in his face. She shall declare: This is what they shall do to the man who will not build up his brother’s house.
25:10His name in Israel shall be: The House of the Man Whose Sandal Was Removed.
Modesty and Business Honesty
25:11If men fight together, one with his brother, and the wife of one approaches to rescue her husband from the one striking him, reaches out her hand, and seizes his testicles,
25:12cut off her hand; your eye shall show her no pity.
25:13Do not keep two different weights in your pouch, large or small.
25:14Do not keep two different measures in your house, large or small.
25:15Keep a true and just weight and a true and just measure, so that you may be long-lived on the land the Lord your God is giving you as an allotment.
25:16For everyone who does these things, everyone who acts unjustly, is an abomination to the Lord your God.
The Command to Blot Out Amalek
25:17Remember what Amalek did to you on the road when you came out of Egypt,
25:18how he opposed you on the road and struck your rear, those tiring behind you, when you were hungry and weary; he did not fear God.
25:19When the Lord your God gives you rest from all surrounding enemies in the land the Lord your God is giving you as an allotment to inherit, erase Amalek’s name from under heaven. Do not forget.
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Saints Translation · Liturgical reading edition · V1 · working draft awaiting specialist review.