2. within any of your gates. The recurrent phrase “within your gates” is the characteristic designation in Deuteronomy of the local town, wherever in the country it may be, in contradistinction to the place of the central sanctuary. Its use in the present context after “in your midst” suggests a subversive source of pagan contamination lurking somewhere within the closed walls of the Israelite habitations. This would be in keeping with Abraham ibn Ezra’s neat observation that “after having mentioned the cultic pole by the altar, which is public to all, he comes back to warn the individual about worship of abominations.”

3. to the sun or to the moon or to any of the array of the heavens. There are some indications, both biblical and extrabiblical, that worship of astral deities, a practice probably influenced by the Assyrian cult, became especially widespread in Israel during the seventh century B.C.E.

which I did not command. This clause may be a rebuke to a popular syncretistic belief that YHWH enjoined the worship of astral deities alongside worship of Him.

6. By the word. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “by the mouth.”

7. The hand of the witnesses shall be against him first. The frequently made observation concerning this stipulation that it will compel the witnesses to be very cautious about their testimony seems rather apologetic. Why, after all, would this opportunity to be first among the executioners not encourage a zealot or a person with a private grudge to offer hasty or even false testimony against the accused idolator? The law in general reflects the antipagan animus of Deuteronomy in an effort to forge a seamless anti-idolatrous Israelite front in which a kind of “popular justice” is carried out by the whole community.

8. between blood and blood, between case and case, and between injury and injury. These three phrases are meant to mark out the whole range of nonritual law. “Between blood and blood” clearly indicates legal disputes or “grievances” (rivot) involving accusations of capital crimes, and murder in particular. The second category, “between case and case” (beyn din ledin), uses a general term for a legal case, but sandwiched in between “blood” and “injury” (negaʿ), it probably refers to torts involving property or money but not bodily injury.

go up to the place that the LORD your God chooses. This set phrase, used throughout the book to underscore the divine authorization of the centralized cult, here serves to authorize a complementary notion—the centralization of judicial power in a single court of appeals instituted at the site of the one chosen sanctuary.

9. the levitical priests. This somewhat odd designation—in the Hebrew it is, literally, “the priests, the Levites”—is distinctive of Deuteronomy. Scholarly consensus infers that in contradistinction to the three preceding books, which variously envisage a priestly class from a particular Levite clan officiating in the cult while the other Levites attend to maintenance chores in the sanctuary, Deuteronomy assumes that all Levites can potentially serve as priests.

and to the judge. The simplest construction is that judicial authority was shared by the priests and a layman jurist.

12. the man who acts willfully. Some interpreters take this as a reference to the judge in the inferior court who refuses to recognize the authority of the central court. The repetition, however, of “willful” in the next verse in connection with “all the people” suggests that it is rather an interested party in the case appealed, who has come to hear the opinion of the supreme court and then, when it proves unfavorable to him, has rejected it. Capital punishment in such a case seems severe, at least by modern standards, but the Deuteronomist, with his usual concern for the consolidation of power in one central place, is fearful that flouting a decision of the supreme court will undermine the whole system.

15. a king whom the LORD your God chooses. Thus, by using the same phrase for both temple and king, the Deuteronomist effects an alignment between the election of a central sanctuary and the election of the monarch. In keeping with the premise that all this is a Mosaic prediction, the fact that the king’s political capital and the sanctuary’s location are one and the same place is not spelled out, even though the seventh-century B.C.E. audience would of course have registered the connection.

16. let him not get himself many horses, that he not turn the people back to Egypt. The many horses, the many wives, the silver and gold, are all associated with the extravagances of royal—indeed, imperial—pomp. Egypt is linked with horses because of its celebrated chariot corps, prominent in the Exodus story, and because it actually was an exporter of horses in the region. (In fact, the Israelties were slow to adopt horses for travel and for warfare through much of the First Temple period, preferring donkeys as mounts.) But turning the people back to Egypt may refer to a condition of virtual or actual slavery to which a profligate monarch could reduce many of his overtaxed subjects through his expenditures.

You shall not turn back again on this way. No explicit statement to this effect is recorded in the preceding books, though, as the Israeli Bible scholar David Cohen-Zemach has proposed, there may be an approximation in Exodus 13:17: “Lest the people regret when they see battle and go back to Egypt.”

17. that his heart not swerve. The precedent of Solomon suggests that a large royal harem would involve a good many politically motivated marriages with foreign princesses, and these could lead the king astray, as in the egregious instance of Jezebel and Ahab.

18. he shall write for himself a copy of this teaching. The king is to be actively engaged in personally producing a text of the teaching (translations that embellish the simple verb “write” by representing it as “cause to be written” miss the point). The location of religious authority in a text, a revolutionary idea, is made dramatically clear. “A copy of this teaching,” which might also be construed as “a repetition of this teaching,” is in Hebrew mishneh hatorah hazoʾt and is the source of one of the Hebrew names as well as the Greek name for Deuteronomy.

in a book. The Hebrew sefer refers to anything written down, from letter to record to what we would call a book. (The form in any case, would be a scroll.) It may well designate here the whole book of Deuteronomy, the valedictory rehearsal of the law delivered by Moses before his death. Some interpreters want to restrict “this teaching” to the just enunciated instructions to the king, but that seems improbable, especially since the text goes on to say, “he shall read in it all the days of his life,” hardly something he would do with a few lines about keeping tight reins on the royal budget.

19. so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God. Many commentators have cited this whole section as a demonstration that the government of ancient Israel was in essence a constitutional monarchy. Instructional texts for kings had many precedents both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, as Moshe Weinfeld points out, so that element is scarcely an innovation. If the document that the king is enjoined here to write and repeatedly read is the entire Book of Deuteronomy, then he has not just a set of admonitions to a monarch but a whole complex of laws and a covenantal vision of history that are binding on him. This does make his regime a constitutional monarchy, but one founded on theocratic authority, the Torah or constitution to be expounded by the priests at the central sanctuary.

20. so that his heart be not haughty over his brothers. The language of brotherhood, earlier used to link affluent and indigent, here links monarch and subjects. Whatever power he exerts, he is not an absolute monarch, and he does not differ in caste or in his relation to the divine from those over whom he rules.

in order that he may long endure in his kingship. In the precarious historical circumstances of the seventh century B.C.E., Deuteronomy makes the continuation of the monarchy conditional on the king’s faithfulness to the words of God’s teaching, just as the people’s continuation in the land promised them is conditional on this fidelity to that same teaching.