1. You shall not gash yourselves nor shall you make a bald place on the front of your head. The consensus is that these were pagan rituals of mourning, specifically prohibited because they involved disfiguring the mourner’s body, which as the body of one of God’s “children,” should be guarded in its integrity. Ritual gashing is attested in the comportment of the Baal priests on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18, although there the intention seems to be not mourning but sympathetic magic (encouraging the descent of divine fire by spilling blood). The Ugaritic texts do reflect gashing as a gesture of mourning. The bald place “on the front of your head” (literally, “between your eyes”) appears to be some sort of tonsure, something that Abraham ibn Ezra, with an eye to his Christian neighbors, registers when he observes, “like the practice of the gentiles to this day.”

6. hooves split in two, bringing up the cud. While the governing principles that determine what creatures may not be eaten are not entirely consistent, there appears to be a recoil from consuming land animals or birds that are predators or scavengers. Thus, permissible animals must have genuine, split hooves and nothing resembling claws, and they must be ruminants, as a kind of guarantee that they are not carnivores. Some structuralist critics have proposed that the Hebrews also had a strong predilection to keep things in neat categories: a sea creature without fins or scales seemed to them, it is inferred, a violation of appropriate categories and hence was forbidden. In any event, as many commentators have noted, the dietary restrictions, coming as they do after the prohibition of two prominent pagan mourning practices, are part of a program for separating Israel from the surrounding peoples.

7–19. the camel and the rock-badger and the hare. In the long list that follows of prohibited animals, once we get beyond the camel and the hare and the pig (the rock-badger being a more questionable identification), it should be kept in mind that most of the English equivalents are approximations or guesses that reflect the tradition of translations more than ancient Hebrew zoology. In verse 16, for example, the three birds mentioned, kos, yanshuf, and tinshemet, may indeed be different kinds of owls (though even that is not entirely certain for all three), but no one really knows precisely what they are. The present translation improvises its own guesses, in the case of the second and third terms guided by the suggestion of breathing, puffing, or emitting some sort of respiratory sound in the Hebrew verbal roots of yanshuf and tinshemet (puff owl and hoot owl). Other translations represent these as “the little owl, the great owl, and the white owl,” with scant evidence for the choices.

12. And this you shall not eat. The list comprises birds of prey and scavengers.

21. You shall not eat any carcass. The Hebrew nevelah refers to the body of an animal that has died of natural causes.

To the sojourner . . . you may give it. The resident alien, generally unable to possess real property, is thought of here, as elsewhere in Deuteronomy, as economically disadvantaged and hence an appropriate object of charity. The foreigner, by contrast, is only a temporary resident or wayfarer and may bring with him economic resources from elsewhere, so he is assumed to be in a position to pay for the carcass.

You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. See the comment on the identical prohibition in Exodus 23:19.

22. You shall surely tithe. Ibn Ezra proposes a link with the preceding section in regard to prohibited eating. The dietary restrictions forbid categories of animals, sea creatures, and birds; the Israelites are forbidden to eat the tithes except “in the place that He chooses”—that is, in the central temple.

23. so that you may learn to fear the LORD your God. This clause is most plausibly linked with the overriding principle of the centralization of the cult: the pilgrim, by experiencing the cult at the central sanctuary and by contact with the priestly caste there, will learn to fear the LORD.

24. And should the way be too much for you. The centralization of the cult entailed a practical difficulty, which was the problem of carrying large quantities of agricultural produce over long distances to the central sanctuary. The solution (verse 25) is to convert the tithed produce into easily portable silver, which then could be reconverted at the sanctuary site into either comestible animals or agricultural produce. (Hence the pragmatic need for money changers in the Temple.)

the LORD blesses you. As very often, this phrase refers to material bounty, a specific meaning that the context makes clear.

25. bundle. The weighted pieces of silver were carried in a leather bundle or purse (tsror, the noun cognate with the verb used here). The husband of the wayward wife in Proverbs 7 goes off on a long trip having taken “the purse of silver” (tsror hakesef) in his hand.

the silver. Coins did not come into use in ancient Israel until the Second Temple period, so the reference is not to money but to readily exchangeable weights of silver.

26. may prompt you to ask. More literally, “may ask you.” In any case, the silver equivalent of 10 percent of the annual agricultural yield would give the pilgrim a great deal of money to spend in a few days, and thus enable him to purchase abundantly whatever he craved.