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Deuteronomy 16: What the Passage Says

78 claims across 22 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Deuteronomy 16 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Moses gives instructions for three yearly festivals: Passover with seven days of unleavened bread, the Feast of Weeks after the grain harvest begins, and the Feast of Tabernacles after the harvest is gathered in. All three are to be kept at the one place the LORD chooses, and all the men of Israel are to come there three times a year, each bringing a gift as he is able. The chapter closes with orders to appoint judges in every town, to judge without bribes or favoritism, and not to set up a sacred wooden pole beside the LORD's altar or to raise a stone pillar, which the LORD hates.

Claim by Claim

  1. 16:1
    • Israel is commanded to observe the month of Abib.
    • Israel is commanded to keep the passover to the LORD their God.
    • In the month of Abib the LORD their God brought them out of Egypt.
    • The LORD brought them out of Egypt by night.
  2. 16:2
    • Israel is to sacrifice the passover to the LORD their God.
    • The passover sacrifice is to be from the flock and the herd.
    • The passover is to be sacrificed at the place the LORD will choose.
    • The LORD will choose that place to make his name dwell there.
  3. 16:3
    • Israel is not to eat leavened bread with the passover sacrifice.
    • For seven days Israel is to eat unleavened bread with it.
    • The unleavened bread is called the bread of affliction.
    • Israel came out of the land of Egypt in haste.
    • The purpose is that Israel remember the day of coming out of the land of Egypt.
    • Israel is to remember that day all the days of their life.
  4. 16:4
    • No leaven is to be seen with Israel in all their territory for seven days.
    • None of the flesh sacrificed in the evening of the first day is to remain overnight until morning.
  5. 16:5
    • Israel may not sacrifice the passover within any of their towns.
    • The LORD their God is giving them those towns.
  6. 16:6
    • The passover is to be sacrificed only at the place the LORD their God will choose.
    • The LORD will choose that place to make his name dwell there.
    • The passover is to be sacrificed in the evening.
    • The passover is to be sacrificed at sunset.
    • That time is the season when Israel came out of Egypt.
  7. 16:7
    • Israel is to cook the passover.
    • Israel is to eat it in the place the LORD their God will choose.
    • In the morning Israel is to turn back and go to their tents.
  8. 16:8
    • For six days Israel is to eat unleavened bread.
    • On the seventh day there is to be a solemn assembly to the LORD their God.
    • Israel is to do no work on that day.
  9. 16:9
    • Israel is to count seven weeks for themselves.
    • The counting of the seven weeks begins from when the sickle is first put to the standing grain.
  10. 16:10
    • Israel is to keep the feast of weeks to the LORD their God.
    • The feast is to be kept with a tribute of a freewill offering from their hand.
    • The measure of the offering is according as the LORD their God has blessed them.
  11. 16:11
    • Israel is to rejoice before the LORD their God.
    • Those rejoicing include the man himself, his son, and his daughter.
    • Those rejoicing include his manservant and his maidservant.
    • Those rejoicing include the Levite who is within their gates.
    • Those rejoicing include the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow who are among them.
    • The rejoicing is to take place at the place the LORD their God chooses to make his name dwell there.
  12. 16:12
    • Israel is to remember that they were slaves in Egypt.
    • Israel is to observe and do these statutes.
  13. 16:13
    • Israel is to keep the feast of tabernacles for seven days.
    • The feast is kept after gathering in from the threshing floor and the winepress.
  14. 16:14
    • Israel is to rejoice in their feast.
    • Those rejoicing include the man himself, his son, and his daughter.
    • Those rejoicing include his manservant and his maidservant.
    • Those rejoicing include the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow who are within their gates.
  15. 16:15
    • For seven days Israel is to hold the feast to the LORD their God.
    • The feast is to be held in the place the LORD will choose.
    • The LORD their God will bless Israel in all their produce.
    • The LORD their God will bless Israel in all the work of their hands.
    • Therefore Israel will surely rejoice.
  16. 16:16
    • Three times in a year all Israel's males are to appear before the LORD their God.
    • They are to appear in the place the LORD will choose.
    • One of the three times is the feast of unleavened bread.
    • One of the three times is the feast of weeks.
    • One of the three times is the feast of tabernacles.
    • They are not to appear before the LORD empty-handed.
  17. 16:17
    • Each man is to give according to the gift of his hand.
    • The amount is according to the blessing the LORD his God has given him.
  18. 16:18
    • Israel is to appoint judges and officers in all their towns.
    • The LORD their God is giving them those towns.
    • The judges and officers are appointed according to their tribes.
    • The judges are to judge the people with righteous judgment.
  19. 16:19
    • Israel is not to pervert judgment.
    • Israel is not to show partiality.
    • Israel is not to take a bribe.
    • A bribe blinds the eyes of the wise.
    • A bribe twists the words of the righteous.
  20. 16:20
    • Israel is to pursue justice, and justice only.
    • The purpose is that Israel may live.
    • The purpose is that Israel may possess the land.
    • The LORD their God is giving them that land.
  21. 16:21
    • Israel is not to plant an Asherah of any wood beside the altar of the LORD their God.
    • Israel will make that altar for themselves.
  22. 16:22
    • Israel is not to set up a standing pillar.
    • The LORD their God hates such a pillar.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

16:1
"Abib" means "ripening ears of grain", the spring month when barley ripened, roughly March–April. After the exile the same month was called Nisan. "Passover" translates Hebrew *pesach*; the name comes from the account of the destroying plague passing over the Israelite houses in Egypt, and it names both the animal killed and the festival itself.
16:2
Elsewhere the Passover animal is a lamb or kid from the flock; here "flock or herd" (herd = cattle) is included because the word covers the whole set of sacrifices eaten during the festival week, not only the Passover animal itself. "The home for his name" is a Hebrew way of saying that God claims a place as his own and is present to be addressed there. The point of the phrase in this chapter is that there is to be one such place, not many local shrines.
16:3
Bread rises because yeast is left to work in the dough over hours. Bread made in a hurry has no time to rise and comes out flat. "The bread of hard times" is the literal sense of the Hebrew, bread that tastes of poverty and of a night of flight.
16:4
The King James "in all thy coast" has nothing to do with the sea; "coast" in 1611 English meant border, and so the territory inside it.
16:5
The King James "within any of thy gates" means "in any of your towns." A walled town was identified by its gate, and the gateway was where public business (markets, meetings, lawsuits) was carried on, so "gates" stands for the town as a whole.
16:7
"Go back to your tents" is the ordinary phrase for going home. It also fits the situation literally: people traveling to the central sanctuary for the festival camped there for the night.
16:8
Verse 3 says seven days of unleavened bread and this verse says six. The two counts are stated from different angles, the seventh day is the assembly day named here, and ancient readers took it as unleavened along with the rest. A "special gathering" (Hebrew *atzeret*) was a closing assembly at the end of a festival, on which normal work stopped.
16:9
A sickle is a short curved blade used to cut standing stalks of grain by hand. The count of seven weeks begins with the first cutting of the barley harvest, so the date depends on when the crop is ready rather than on a fixed number in a calendar.
16:10
The "Feast of Weeks" is named for those seven weeks. It fell fifty days after the count began, which is why Greek-speaking Jews later called it Pentecost, "fiftieth"; its Hebrew name is Shavuot. It marked the end of the grain harvest. A "freewill offering" was one no law required by amount, the giver set the size himself, here in proportion to that year's harvest.
16:11
The Levites were the one tribe given no block of farmland of their own; they lived scattered in the towns and were supported from offerings and tithes. That is why they are listed here beside the others who had no land or family to fall back on. The "foreigner" is not a passing traveler but a resident outsider living long-term among Israelites without inherited land of his own.
16:12
"Bondman" means slave. Israelite law keeps grounding its rules about servants, foreigners and the poor in the memory that the nation itself had once been forced labor in Egypt.
16:13
The King James "feast of tabernacles" uses "tabernacle" in its old sense of a tent or hut; the Hebrew name is Sukkot, "booths." It was the autumn festival at the end of the farming year, during which people camped out in temporary shelters made of branches. The Hebrew literally says "your threshing floor and your winepress", a threshing floor was a flat, hard, open area where cut grain was beaten and tossed to separate the kernels from the husks; a winepress was a hollowed basin where grapes were trodden. Naming the two places is a way of saying "once the whole harvest is in."
16:16
These three were the pilgrimage festivals, the occasions when men were expected to travel to the central sanctuary rather than mark the day at home. The Feast of Bread Without Yeast is the week that follows Passover, so the three fall in spring, early summer, and autumn, around the barley harvest, the wheat harvest, and the final ingathering. "Not empty-handed" means not without an offering in hand.
16:18
The "officials" (Hebrew *shoterim*) were not judges but administrative officers, record-keepers and enforcers who summoned parties, kept documents, and carried out decisions. Cases were heard publicly in the open space inside the town gate.
16:19
Three King James idioms: "wrest judgment" means to bend or twist a legal decision out of shape; "respect persons" is literally "recognise faces," that is, to decide a case according to who the parties are rather than the facts; and "a gift" here means specifically a payment made to a judge, a bribe.
16:20
The Hebrew repeats the word: "justice, justice you shall pursue." Doubling a word this way is how the language gives emphasis, so the sense is something like "justice and only justice."
16:21
The King James "grove" translates the Hebrew word *asherah*. An Asherah was a wooden pole or stylised tree set up beside an altar as the emblem of the goddess Asherah, worshiped in Canaan as a mother goddess. The object was a single planted upright, not a wood.
16:22
The King James "image" here means a *matzevah*: an upright stone slab or pillar set on end at a place of worship. Such standing stones were a normal feature of Canaanite shrines, and earlier Israelite figures had set them up as markers; this law rules them out.

Read Deuteronomy 16