1. You shall not bear a false rumor. This injunction begins a group of laws intended to enforce the concept of equality before the law and equity in social behavior, regardless of social standing or condition of enmity or amity. The prohibition on bearing false rumor is reminiscent in formulation of the third of the Ten Commandments, but instead of pertaining to solemn oaths, it addresses the capacity of ordinary speech to do harm.

You shall not put your hand with the guilty. The Hebrew idiom, here literally translated, transparently means to be in league with someone. This injunction stands in a relation of intensifying parallelism (a typical pattern in biblical poetry) with the immediately preceding one. Distortion of the truth is involved in both, but there is an intensification from rumormongering to perjury.

2. You shall not follow the many for evil. The last word here could also be rendered “harm.” The most straightforward way to construe this verse is as an injunction to cling to one’s own sense of what is right despite the temptation to follow popular opinion, including when popular opinion is bent on the perversion of justice.

to go askew, to skew it in support of the many. The Hebrew, as the translation may suggest, seems a little awkward because “to go askew” (lintot) appears to be unnecessary and perhaps a little confusing when followed by the same verb in the causative form, lehatot, “to skew.” It is conceivable that the repetition was introduced to underline formally the notion of skewing or tilting justice, which every person is enjoined to avoid.

3. Nor a poor person shall you favor in his dispute. Throughout these laws, “dispute” (riv) refers to contention in a court of law. The principle of equality before the law requires the avoidance of any juridical “affirmative action”—one must give no preferential treatment in court either to the poor man because of his afflictions or to the rich man because of his power.

5. your adversary’s donkey sprawling under its load. This is the first, but by no means the only, expression of humanitarian concern for animals in the Torah. The suffering of the beast must take precedence over a person’s hostility toward the beast’s owner.

you shall surely assist him. The rare Hebrew verb ʿ-z-b is the homonym of a common verb that means “to abandon.” It occurs twice elsewhere in the Bible in the sense of “to perform,” “to arrange,” “to assist,” and it has cognates with this meaning in both Ugaritic and Arabic. The object of the verb (“him”) could be either the master or the donkey, but the former seems more likely: a heavily loaded donkey would not be wandering around by itself; the person would know to whom it belongs by seeing the owner; and the moral imperative would be all the more pressing because he is enjoined to give a hand to a man he hates.

6. You shall not skew the case of your indigent in his dispute. This formulation is the complement of verse 3. No one should grant preferential treatment to the poor man in justice, but here the judge is reminded that the poor should not be prejudicially mistreated in court. “Case,” mishpat, can also mean “justice.”

7. I will not acquit the guilty. The judge is implicitly thought of as a surrogate of God, obliged to enact only what is right, as God does.

8. blinds . . . perverts. The aphoristic parallelism sounds rather like the Book of Proverbs.

the sighted. The Hebrew adjective designates both those who have the faculty of sight and, by metaphorical extension, those who are keen-sighted. As a kind of gloss on the term, a parallel law in Deuteronomy substitutes for “sighted” the explicit “wise” (the sense of the term in modern Hebrew).

9. the sojourner’s heart. The Hebrew is nefesh, “life,” “inner nature,” “essential being,” “breath.”

11. let it go. The Hebrew verb shamat means “to release,” “to allow to slip out of one’s grip.” The noun derived from this verb, shemitah, is the general term for sabbatical year.

and your people’s indigent may eat of it. The motive for the sabbatical year is a partial redressing of social inequity, thus linking it with the immediately preceding laws. The ecological advantage of allowing fields to lie fallow is not mentioned.

12. so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and your bondman and the sojourner catch their breath. Unlike the Decalogue, but entirely in keeping with the context of the present code of laws, the rationale for the sabbath offered here is neither theological (God’s resting after creation) nor historical (the liberation from Egyptian slavery) but humanitarian. “Catch their breath” (wayinafesh) is represented in most translations as “be refreshed.” It is cognate with nefesh, most probably in the sense of “breath,” and is related to the verb nashaf, “to breathe hard or pant.” The idea of catching one’s breath is consonant with the representation in Job and elsewhere in the Bible of the laborer panting from his work and longing to draw a long breath of relief after labor.

13. And in all that I have said to you, you shall watch yourselves. This summarizing command reintroduces, in the next clause, the obligation of loyalty to the single God and thus serves as a transition from the group of laws bearing on justice and social equity to the laws of the pilgrim festivals, which are national, seasonal expressions of fealty to God.

14. Three times. The word for “times” here, regalim, is different from peʿamim, the word used at the beginning of verse 17. Both terms mean “foot,” the apparent connection with “time” being the counting of times with the tap of a foot.

15. appear in My presence. The original form of the Hebrew indicated “see My face [or presence],” but the Masoretes revocalized the verb as a passive, “to be seen” or “to appear,” in order to avoid what looked like excessive anthropomorphism.

16. Harvest . . . Ingathering. The Festival of Flatbread (“Passover” is not used here) would be in April. The harvest (Shavuoth) of first fruits would occur in late May or early June, and Ingathering (Succoth) the harvest of most later crops, in late September or early October.

19. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. This famous prohibition would become the basis in rabbinic dietary regulations for the absolute separation of meat and dairy foods. Two different kinds of justification have been proposed for the prohibition. Maimonides and many after him suggest that the law is a response to a pagan cultic practice known to the ancients of eating a kid prepared in its mother’s milk. There is no clear-cut archaeological evidence of such a practice—Maimonides merely inferred it interpretively. One fragmentary mythological text in Ugaritic may in fact refer to this culinary item, though that reconstruction of the text has been disputed. The other approach, espoused by Abraham ibn Ezra (a little tentatively) and many others, is to explain the prohibition on humanitarian grounds. The sensitivity toward animals previously evinced in this group of laws gives some plausibility to the humanitarian possibility. Since no actual aggravation of the animals’ suffering is involved, the recoil from this commingling would be on the symbolic level: the mixture of the mother animal’s nurturing milk with the slaughtered flesh of her offspring, a promiscuous joining of life and death.

20. I am about to send a messenger before you. Although modern rationalist commentators have sought to explain this as a metaphor for providential guidance, the frankly mythological terms of the preceding narrative—the pillars of cloud and fire, the Destroyer in Egypt—invite us to imagine the messenger as a fearsome agent of God, perhaps human in form like the divine messengers in Genesis, leading the people through the wilderness.

21. he will not pardon your trespass, for My name is within him. The messenger is not only a guide for the Wilderness wanderings but an unblinking executor of divine surveillance. The mention of the divine name is the earliest of a scattering of biblical references to a quasimythological notion of God’s name as a potent agency in its own right. This idea would be elaborately developed in later Jewish mysticism.

22. I shall be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes. The perfect parallelism of this statement recalls the symmetry of a line of biblical poetry, and several verses in this concluding section of the Book of the Covenant approximate the formal balance and high solemnity of poetry.

24. tear them down. The verb here, haras, indicates that the object is the idols, not the idolators.

pillars. The reference is to cultic pillars, or steles.

27. turn tail. The Hebrew refers to the nape of the neck, which the fleeing enemy shows to his pursuer.

28. I shall send the hornet before you. There is some question about what is sent: the noun tsirʿah appears in the Bible only three times, all in the context of the conquest of Canaan. The strong consensus of later Hebrew tradition—there is some dissent—is that it refers to a noxious stinging insect. In that case, the word functions here as a collective noun (rather common biblical usage for animals) and refers to dense swarms of hornets. An alternative I would like to propose is that the root is related (with consonants reversed) to the verb raʿats, “to smash,” and that this is a mythological rather than a zoological entity, the Smasher (or Smashing), which would be strictly parallel or equivalent to “My terror” at the beginning of verse 27.

29. lest the land become desolate. The Hebrew writer, faced with the discomfiting report of the tradition available to him that the conquest of the land, underwritten by solemn divine promise, took more than two centuries, is driven to find some explanation for the delay. (The Book of Judges will propose three rather different explanations.) The prospect sketched here of a suddenly depopulated land overrun by wild beasts and too big for the Hebrews seems intrinsically implausible, and it is hard to square the notion of Israel awaiting its own natural increase (“until you are fruitful”) with the figure offered earlier of 600,000 adult males, which implied a total population of well over two million.

31. I shall fix its borders. These grandiose borders, which would make biblical Israel seem a bit like Texas, do not correspond to any actual historical reality but are rather a kind of imaginative nationalist fantasy of what a “spacious land” (Exodus 3:8) might look like. Different, equally ideal borders are mentioned elsewhere.

the Red Sea. In this context, this is the more plausible geographical reference of yam suf, rather than Sea of Reeds, which would probably be a marshland in northeastern Egypt.

32. You shall not make a pact with them or with their gods. Ibn Ezra, with his keen eye for connections, relates the previous verse to this one: even though God will give Israel this vast expanse of territory (presumably, filled with subject peoples), the temptation of embracing the gods of the native population must be resisted.