1. The levitical priests. Abraham ibn Ezra, with his penchant for identifying connections between consecutive passages (what we would call editorial principles), observes that this section on priests immediately follows the section on kings: the king, who acts as supreme judicial authority, is enjoined to make himself a copy of the teaching, or Torah, which the priests make available and which is their responsibility to expound.

His estate. The reference is not entirely clear, though Rashi plausibly proposes that the term indicates categories of sacrifice other than the fire offering.

6. he shall come as much as his appetite craves to the place that the LORD chooses. It is possible that the polyvalent nefesh (“appetite”) here is simply an intensive substitute for the pronoun “he,” though even in this case there may be a consideration of appetite because the central sanctuary is the place where all the choice cuts of meat are available for the Levites. There is to be no hindrance for any Levite who desires to come to the central place, even though presumably the cult could not have really offered positions as officiants to all of them.

7. stand there in attendance. “In attendance” is not explicitly stated in the Hebrew but is implied by the idiom “stand before.”

8. Share for share. All the Levites at the sanctuary are to have an equal share of the animals, even those not directly employed in the cult.

besides his sales from the patrimony. The Hebrew is obscure. This translation assumes the following general meaning: besides what the Levite may have realized by selling off property he has inherited from his fathers (the literal meaning of the word rendered as “patrimony”). Others revocalize mimkaraw, “his sales,” as mimakaraw, “from his acquaintances”—i.e., funds or property the Levite has received from personal acquaintances, on top of whatever patrimony he has. That reading looks forced.

10. who passes his son or his daughter through fire. It is not certain whether this phrase refers to child sacrifice, elsewhere stringently forbidden, or to some pagan dedicatory rite in which the child was passed through or, more probably, over fire without harm.

a speller of charms, a soothsayer. The precise demarcations among these terms are no longer known, though the last three in the series all clearly refer to necromancy. Stylistically, the series may function not as a legislative list of discriminated terms but as a grand drumroll of synonyms, conveying the idea that no shape or manner of divination will be tolerated. Making predictions based on a variety of techniques, from the inspection of the liver and the entrails of a slaughtered animal to tapping the supposed knowledge of departed spirits, was a major industry throughout the ancient Near East, as thousands of divinatory texts from Egypt to Mesopotamia attest. The biblical abhorrence of these practices stems not so much from a disbelief in their efficacy as from a sense that they violate God’s prerogatives by establishing a technology of the realm of spirits, which is thus assumed to be wholly susceptible to human manipulation.

13. wholehearted. The word tamim means “whole,” “without blemish” but the root also appears in the collocation tom levav, “wholeness of heart.” The idea in context is that you cannot serve God and yet keep one foot in the pagan realm by having recourse to necromancy and divination.

15. A prophet like me. The envisaged future prophet is not necessarily like Moses in stature but in function—an intermediary between Israel and God (verses 16–17) and someone who hears and then transmits God’s words.

18. I shall put My words in his mouth. In contrast to the sundry techniques of deciphering arcane patterns in entrails or smoke and pronouncing incantations, the idea of prophecy is based on articulated speech—from God to prophet and from prophet to people—and hence the verb daber, “speak,” and the cognate noun davar, “word,” are insisted on again and again here.

22. the thing does not happen and does not come about. “Thing” here is also “word,” since davar refers both to speech and to the referent of speech, and in vatic contexts also has the technical sense of “oracle.” This criterion for detecting false prophecy presents notorious difficulties and seems to be put forth here chiefly out of some general sense that a true prophet will speak the truth. The literary prophets in the biblical canon are less in the business of prediction than of castigation. The predictions they make of national catastrophe are almost always conditioned on Israel’s failure to change its ways, and the predictions of glorious national restoration in the face of imminent disaster are always projected beyond the immediate future. It is conceivable that this text does not have in mind literary prophets but rather prophets who addressed mundane issues of everyday life, making short-range predictions that might be quickly verified or falsified by the events.