1. his father’s wife. Since the term “wed” could not be used for a man’s mother or for a woman currently married to the man’s father, the phrase would have to mean his father’s widow (who might be fairly young, in light of the early age at which girls were married off) or a woman divorced from his father.

he shall not uncover his father’s skirt. What is involved is taboo by metonymic contamination: a man should not come in contact with the female nakedness that was once in conjugal contact with his own father’s nakedness. David Cohen-Zemach interestingly detects here an allusion to Ham’s seeing his father Noah’s nakedness (Genesis 9:22), Ham being the father of Canaan, the eponymous progenitor of the Canaanite peoples. What closely follows (verse 4) is a prohibition against ever accepting the Moabites and the Ammonites, two peoples purportedly engendered out of incestuous union with a father, into the Israelite community.

2. crushed testes or lopped member. This prohibition may simply express a vehement rejection of both forms of castration, in fact fairly commonly practiced in the ancient Near East. But the law as it is formulated also excludes from the assembly a man who is sexually mutilated through some accident. In this patriarchal culture, the integrity of the body is strongly connected with the integrity of the capacity for fatherhood. The prohibition, then, is thematically related to the immediately preceding prohibition against uncovering one’s father’s skirt, both expressing a horror of violation of the body of the father.

3. misbegotten. The Hebrew mamzer (etymology uncertain) later comes to mean “bastard,” but the convincing consensus of both traditional and modern commentators is that it refers to the offspring of a taboo, or incestuous, union.

4. Ammonite nor Moabite. It is not entirely clear why these two peoples should be permanently excluded for their hostility toward the Israelites approaching Canaan, whereas the Edomites, who were scarcely more friendly, and the Egyptians, who wanted to murder the entire population of Hebrew male infants, are to be accepted in the community. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Boaz married a Moabite woman, Ruth, who then became progenitrix of David’s royal line. (Abraham ibn Ezra’s contention that the ban is against Moabite men, not women, seems strained.) One must conclude that as historical circumstances shifted, attitudes in ancient Israel toward the sundry neighboring peoples also changed, and these changes are reflected in the inconsistencies of the texts.

shall not come into the LORD’s assembly. Jeffrey H. Tigay argues persuasively that the assembly is primarily a civic concept, roughly analogous to the polis among the Greeks. To come into the assembly, then, means to become a naturalized citizen. That status, of course, would also have entailed worship of the God of Israel.

11. not clean through nocturnal emission. This cluster of regulations about remaining in a state of purity in the military camp is predicated on the notion that “the LORD your God walks about in the midst of your camp” (verse 15), acting as guarantor of victory. Soldiers on a campaign at least sometimes took upon themselves a vow of sexual abstinence for the duration of the fighting, as one sees in the David story (1 Samuel 21:5–6), and the ritual impurity imparted by an involuntary emission of semen is related to that practice.

13. a marker. The Hebrew yad (primary meaning, “hand”) also means “monument” or “marker.” The common claim that here the sense is “place” stands on scanty philological grounds.

14. a spike. The Hebrew yated usually means “tent peg.”

battle gear. The rare term ʾazen is probably an Aramaizing form of zayin, “weapon.”

15. shamefully exposed. The Hebrew is literally “nakedness of a thing,” but the word for “nakedness,” ʿerwah, is specifically the term for prohibited sexual nakedness, that which should never be exposed, and so carries a strong connotation of shame.

16. You shall not hand over to his master a slave. The scholarly consensus is that this injunction to offer asylum to runaway slaves (an unusual law in the ancient world) refers to foreign slaves. Israelite slaves, who were in essence indentured servants, would have been freed after six years.

18. cult-harlot . . . cult-catamite. The precise meaning of these two terms, qedeshah and qadesh, is disputed. There is no clear-cut evidence that ritual prostitution was practiced in the ancient Near East, although it remains an undeniable possibility. (Ritual prostitution was known in nearby Asia Minor, the original homeland of the Hittites who often pass through the biblical scene.) Exceptionally, the female qedeshah is presented here before the male qadesh, suggesting she was the more familiar type. The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 makes it clear that qedeshah was some sort of more refined or dignified designation for a prostitute: Judah takes Tamar for a “whore” (zonah); Hirah his emissary then refers to her more decorously as a qedeshah. Since the root means “sacred,” it is a reasonable inference that the qedeshah was either a woman who prostituted herself as part of the cult (in that case, a fertility cult) or a prostitute working near the site of a sanctuary who devoted part of her professional income to the sanctuary. Since the pilgrim obligation to participate in the temple service was laid upon the males, the qadesh would in all likelihood have been a homosexual prostitute, as the translation “cult-catamite” is meant to indicate.

19. a whore’s pay nor a dog’s price. It is not clear whether the second of these phrases refers literally to what is gained by selling or bartering a dog or whether (perhaps more probably, because dogs had limited economic value in this society) “dog” is a contemptuous term for the qadesh. Dogs, we should recall, were despised in ancient Hebrew culture, thought of chiefly as unpleasant scavengers. They were not kept as pets and may not have been used for hunting or shepherding.

21. From the stranger you may exact interest but from your brother you shall not exact interest. The prohibition against interest (the term, at least etymologically, means “bite”) is predicated on an agrarian society of “brothers” in which loans are extended as a form of temporary charity. The ban may not have included properly mercantile loans, and it was not generally applied as Israelite society became more fully urbanized. Foreigners can be required to pay interest because the paradigmatic case would be foreign merchants traveling among the Israelites for business purposes.

23. should you refrain from making a vow. The vow is a “freewill gift,” and no one is under any obligation to make such a vow. But should a person in fact undertake a vow, he is strictly responsible to fulfill it promptly.

25. Should you come into your fellow man’s vineyard. This is by no means a country crisscrossed with highways, and thus it would often have been necessary to pass through someone’s vineyard or field on a narrow path in order to reach one’s destination.

26. you may pluck tender ears. The Hebrew melilot is derived from a verbal stem that means to rub between the fingers and is distinct from shibolim, “mature ears of grain.” The melilot (like the grapes) are thus a kind of available snack for the hungry pedestrian, but neither ears nor grapes are to be the object of actual harvesting, by wielding a sickle or filling a pouch.