1. your brother’s ox or his sheep. This brief group of laws about the obligation to return lost property and help one’s fellow man corresponds to Exodus 23:4–5 with an important terminological difference: Exodus posits the extreme case of finding the beast of your “enemy,” whereas Deuteronomy, with its commitment to imagining a united community of the Israelite people, repeatedly uses the term “your brother.”

ignore. The literal meaning is “hide yourself,” i.e., pretend you don’t see.

2. gather it into your house. Although this might simply mean “take into the jurisdiction of your household,” in fact Canaanite domestic structures often had an enclosure used as a stable on the ground floor. The word thus emphasizes that the finder of the beast is to keep it safe and sheltered until the owner appears.

5. There shall not be a man’s gear on a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman’s garment. The word keli (“gear”) might mean clothing, as it does in rabbinic Hebrew, but it is an all-purpose term that could also refer to weapons, as some scholars have contended. (The fact that a verb for wearing is not used for the woman might lend support to this contention.) What is “abhorrent” about the practice of cross-dressing could be an association with pagan orgiastic activities or even with pagan magic (a Hittite text prescribes cross-dressing as the first stage in a ritual for curing impotence). In any case, the common denominator shared by this law and those that follow is, as anthropological critics have noted, a general recoil of ancient Hebrew culture from the commingling of distinct, often binary categories—male and female, nurture and killing, seeds of different plants, wool (from animals) and linen (from plants), conjugality and promiscuity.

6. you shall not take the mother together with the young. The often asserted humanitarian motivation of this law is a little ambiguous because, after all, the mother is separated from her fledglings or eggs, which are fated to end up on someone’s dinner table. This law has sometimes been compared with the prohibition against eating a kid boiled in its mother’s milk: there appears to be a sense that the order of nature is violated when the destruction of life includes the biological producer and nurturer of life. Others have detected here a pragmatic, or ecological, consideration: if one makes a practice of killing both fledglings and mother, the race of birds will not be able to reproduce itself.

8. build a new house. This particular law does not seem to be connected with the surrounding laws that involve the separation of distinct categories. Perhaps the editor linked it associatively with the discovery of the bird’s nest because of the idea of potential death on the heights.

should someone fall from it. The Hebrew literally says, “should he who falls fall from it,” the subject of the clause being, as Abraham ibn Ezra observes, a proleptic usage.

9. lest the ripe crop be proscribed. This phrase, and any rationale for the law other than the separation of distinct categories, are equally obscure. The meaning of meleiʾah, “ripe crop” (from the word that means “full”) is in dispute. “Proscribed” is literally “sanctified,” but to be sanctified, or set aside, can also mean to be taboo, as Rashi notes, with several biblical instances. In any case, no one has offered an entirely satisfactory explanation of why the crop of mixed seeds should be sanctified or proscribed.

10. You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. In this case, the separation of the two kinds of beasts has a clear humanitarian motive, for the smaller animal would suffer in this yoking.

11. shaʿatnez. This term seems to be a foreign loanword, perhaps from the Egyptian, and so, lest its sense be obscure, the rest of the verse is a gloss on its meaning. Minglings of wool and linen were worn by the priests and used in the sanctuary trappings, so the separation of categories here may be intended to draw a line between the profane and the holy.

12. tassels. The Hebrew word gedilim differs from “fringe,” tsitsit, used in Numbers 15:38–41, and here no mention is made that the tassel is a mnemonic device for the believing Israelites. Fringes at the hems of garments were fairly common in ancient Near Eastern apparel.

13. come to bed with her and hate her. The extreme concision of the sequence of verbs in the Hebrew does not allow us to conclude whether the man was immediately disaffected with the woman out of sexual dissatisfaction or whether he simply came to be displeased with her with the passage of conjugal time.

14. I came close to her. In his denunciation of the woman, the husband uses a euphemism, an idiom not restricted to sex, instead of the narrator’s plain “came to bed with” (literally, “came into”).

no signs of virginity. The Hebrew betulim means both the condition of virginity and the concrete evidence of virginity. In this case, the husband is claiming that he found neither an intact hymen nor signs of blood after the consummation of the act.

15. bring out to the elders of the town at the gate the signs of . . . virginity. One infers that the bride would have entrusted to the safekeeping of her parents—probably, her mother—as legal insurance the bloodied sheet or garment (sleeping in one’s garment being common in this culture) after the nuptial night.

16. and he hated her. The parents of the bride, though recycling words already used, understandably delete the verb for sexual intercourse.

18. punish him. The rabbinic understanding of this term, which is historically plausible, is that it means public flogging.

19. fine him. A fine is appropriate because the man’s calculation may have been chiefly financial: he would have been able to divorce the woman without the defamation but in that case would have been obliged to restore her dowry to her, which served as a kind of divorce insurance for the wife.

give it to the young woman’s father. One must keep in mind that in this society marriage was chiefly a transaction between the father of the bride and the groom (or the groom together with his father). The defamatory husband has essentially suggested that the young woman’s father passed off damaged goods on him, and so now he owes the father an indemnity.

he shall not be able to send her away ever. “Send her away” here has the technical sense of “divorce.” It might seem a dubious recompense for a woman to continue as wife of a man who hates her and has tried to destroy her reputation. (Even more extremely, the unbetrothed victim of a rapist, verse 29, is to become his wife, without possibility of divorce.) But in this society, the condition of a woman who is not a virgin and has no husband is quite desperate (witness Tamar’s sense that her life is virtually ended after she has been raped, 2 Samuel 13). The law is no prescription for her happiness, but at least it guarantees her social and economic security.

21. stone her to death. This is still another instance of a draconian law in Deuteronomy—the capital punishment for premarital sex far exceeds even the sternness of other ancient Near Eastern codes—which the rabbis sought to mitigate through exegesis. Since death sentences are not supposed to be issued without the firm testimony of at least two eyewitnesses, “if this thing be true,” the rabbis plausibly argued, means that the sentence could be pronounced only if two witnesses actually observed the illicit act of intercourse, merely circumstantial evidence being excluded by principle. If that is the case, implementation of the death sentence would have been extremely rare.

for she has done a scurrilous thing in Israel. This particular Hebrew phrase, nevalah beyisraʾel, is regularly used to indicate a shameful sexual act.

in her own father’s house. The phrase might mean simply, while she was under her father’s jurisdiction, but the concreteness of the idiom leaves open the more scandalous possibility that her assignations actually took place under her father’s roof.

24. to the gate of that town. Repeatedly, the gate is the place of public judgment.

25. in the field. The obvious point is that out in the open, beyond the town, there is no one else present to hear the woman’s cry for help. But “the field,” beyond the perimeters of safe communal existence, often figures in biblical language as a dangerous zone where marauders, wild animals, even demons prey on people.

and the man seize her. This verb, indicating that the man is forcing himself on her, is absent from the law about the woman in the town. There the presumption is that she is a willing partner since, had he forcibly “seized” her, she would have called out for help and presumably gotten it. One should keep in mind that Canaanite or Israelite towns were small and crowded, lacking the desolate neighborhoods with empty streets one can find in a large modern city. Precisely for that reason, this translation regularly renders the Hebrew term ʿir as “town,” not “city.”

29. the man . . . shall give to the young woman’s father fifty weights of silver. Deflowering the unbetrothed young woman would make her unmarriageable (see the third comment on verse 19) and entail financial loss for her father, who would be deprived of the bride-price. The double remedy of the law, however odd it may seem to modern eyes in permanently binding the rape victim and the rapist, is to decree that the man marry the woman without possibility of divorce, and that he pay a bride-price to her father. It is not clear whether there was a standard bride-price in Israelite society, but fifty weights of silver sounds generous.