1. on the soil. Although ʾadamah has the extended meaning of “land” (and in some cases even “the earth”), its primary sense of “soil” is especially relevant to this and many passages in Deuteronomy. Violently shed blood soaks into the soil, pollutes it, cries out for justice (as in the murder of Abel), and when the murderer remains unknown, a special ritual is required to cleanse the polluted soil and atone for the blood shed. Abraham ibn Ezra notes that this law on bloodshed within the community of Israel immediately follows the laws pertaining to conduct in violent conflict with external enemies.

3. the elders of that town. The whole community is plagued with the miasma of bloodguilt—like Thebes at the beginning of Oedipus the King—and so must act as a community through its elders to purge the guilt.

4. a swift-running wadi. In all likelihood, this refers to a wadi that is filled with a powerful torrent during the rainy season and would not provide suitable terrain along its banks for cultivation. The wadi thus is a wilderness water source, outside the pale of regular civilized undertakings, and therefore a suitable setting for this rite of expiation for an unsolved crime against humanity.

7. Our hands . . . our eyes. In this formula of exculpation, the elders declare both that they—presumably this includes everyone in the community they represent—have not committed the murder and that they have not witnessed it, and so have no knowledge of the killer’s identity.

11. a woman of comely features. The same epithet is attached to Joseph in Genesis 39 when the captive Hebrew becomes the object of his Egyptian mistress’s lustful gaze. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, captive women of vanquished peoples were assumed to be the due sexual prerogative of the victors (compare Briseus at the beginning of the Iliad). This law exceptionally seeks to provide for the human rights of the woman who falls into this predicament.

and take her for yourself as wife. This expression is proleptic: the victor, desiring the woman, intends to make her his wife (or rather concubine), but that intention, as the next two verses clearly indicate, cannot be realized until the end of a thirty-day period after he returns home with her.

12. she shall shave her head and do her nails. Several of the medieval Hebrew commentators construe this as intended to make her unattractive. That is, her captor, having been smitten with desire when he first saw the beautiful woman, may now have second thoughts about her desirability and change his mind. But especially since trimming the nails would scarcely impair her attractiveness, it is more likely that this cutting of excrescences growing from the body, together with the removal of the garment of captivity, is a rite of transition that marks the woman’s transformation from the daughter of an alien people to a fit mate for an Israelite man. The period of thirty days—the set duration of all mourning—for her keening for the parents she has left behind is another indication that the law encodes a ritual of transition.

13. come to bed with her. Literally, “come into her.” For the implication of this particular idiom for sexual intercourse, see the comment on Genesis 6:4.

master her. The verb baʿal means “to cohabit,” “to master,” “to exert the capacity of a husband.”

14. if you like her not. The implication is that this disinclination toward the woman occurs at some point after she has become the man’s sexual partner.

garner profit. The Hebrew verb hitʿamer occurs only here and in 24:7 and its precise meaning is uncertain. Many understand it to mean “enslave” (Abraham ibn Ezra cites a supposed Persian cognate meaning “slavery”). This translation is based on the conjecture that the verb may be related to ʿomer, “sheaf of grain,” and hence have something to do with extracting material benefit, as in a harvest.

abused her. The verb ʿinah, “abuse,” “debase,” “afflict,” is also sometimes used for rape, and its employment here astringently suggests that the sexual exploitation of a captive woman, even in a legally sanctioned arrangement of concubinage, is equivalent to rape.

15. beloved . . . hated. There is some evidence that these ordinary Hebrew verbs, when applied to co-wives, have the technical sense of favored and unfavored wife. But it is worth preserving the literal meaning in translation because the language thus includes the possibility of an extreme case: even when you adore one wife and despise the other, you must grant the son of the woman you despise the rights of the firstborn if they are his due.

17. double. Some interpreters argue that the Hebrew pi shnayim (literally, “the mouth of two”) means two-thirds, as it does in Zechariah 13:8. The extant evidence is that there were varying proportional arrangements for favoring the firstborn in inheritance.

his first yield of manhood. This is the same phrase Jacob uses for his firstborn, Reuben, in Genesis 49:3 (see the comment there on that phrase). The idiom may well have been proverbial, a kind of kenning for the firstborn, and it appears to reflect a belief that the first production of the virile vigor (Hebrew ʾon) of a man is endowed with special power.

20. a glutton and a drunk. This designation is a clear indication that the carousing rebellious son is an adult.

21. the people of his town shall stone him to death. The sternness of this law surpasses that of ancient Near Eastern analogues, which variously punish the refractory son with public shaming, imprisonment, or disinheritance. The rabbis were sufficiently uncomfortable with this law to virtually disallow it. Thus the Babylonian Talmud: “The wayward and rebellious son never existed and never will exist. Then why is it written? To say, inquire and receive the reward [i.e., for strictly didactic purposes]” (Sanhedrin 71A). It should be noted that the whole community (presumably after judicial proceedings) takes part in the execution, and in this instance the hand of the witnesses (the parents) is not first against the condemned, so justice is transferred from parental authority to the community.

22. hang him on a tree. One modern view, with an eye to Assyrian practice, understands this as impalement on a pole or gibbet, though the Mishnah has in view hanging the corpse to a kind of cross after the execution. “Tree,” one might recall, in older English usage, can refer to either a gallows or to the cross.

23. a hanged man is God’s curse. The meaning of these words is in dispute, especially because of the polyvalence of ʾelohim—God, gods, divine beings, spirits. Some modern commentators prefer the last of these alternatives, yielding the sense: a corpse left hanging is a curse or blight to the departed spirit that once inhabited it. This suggestion, however, does not jibe well with “You shall not pollute your soil,” a clause suggesting that a corpse left unburied is a violation of the sacredness of the human body, a violation that pollutes the land. (In this connection, compare Antigone.) To leave a body hanging, then, may simply be a disgrace or curse in the eyes of God. Alternately, ʾelohim might even be simply a suffix of intensification: a hanged man is a supreme curse.