Deuteronomy 21: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter gives several separate laws for life in the land. It sets out what a town must do when a murder victim is found and the killer is unknown, how a soldier may marry a woman taken captive in war and what he owes her, the firstborn son's right to a double share of the inheritance even if his mother is the wife the father does not love, the stoning of a stubborn and rebellious son at his parents' complaint, and the requirement to bury an executed body the same day rather than leave it hanging overnight.

Claim by Claim

1. 21:1
   • A slain person may be found in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess.
   • The body is lying in the open field.
   • It is not known who struck him down.
   • The following procedure applies in that case.
2. 21:2
   • Your elders and your judges are to go out.
   • They are to measure the distance to the cities that surround the slain man.
3. 21:3
   • The city nearest to the slain man is the one responsible.
   • The elders of that nearest city are to take a heifer from the herd.
   • The heifer must be one that has never been worked with.
   • The heifer must be one that has never pulled in a yoke.
4. 21:4
   • The elders of that city are to bring the heifer down to a wadi or valley described by a word that may mean ever-flowing with water or may mean rugged and untilled.
   • That valley must be one that is not plowed.
   • That valley must be one that is not sown.
   • The elders are to break the heifer's neck there in the valley.
5. 21:5
   • The priests, the sons of Levi, are to come forward.
   • The LORD your God has chosen them to minister to him.
   • The LORD your God has chosen them to pronounce blessing in the name of the LORD.
   • Every dispute is to be settled by their word.
   • Every case of the kind called a nega, a term covering both bodily affliction and injury from assault, is to be settled by their word.
6. 21:6
   • All the elders of the city nearest the slain man are to wash their hands.
   • They wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley.
7. 21:7
   • The elders are to speak and declare a statement.
   • They declare that their hands did not shed this blood.
   • They declare that their eyes did not see it.
8. 21:8
   • The elders ask the LORD to make atonement for his people Israel.
   • The elders state that the LORD redeemed his people Israel.
   • The elders ask the LORD not to place innocent blood in the midst of his people Israel.
   • The blood will be atoned for on their behalf.
9. 21:9
   • By this you shall purge the innocent blood from among you.
   • This holds when you do what is right in the eyes of the LORD.
10. 21:10
    • You may go out to war against your enemies.
    • The LORD your God may deliver the enemy into your hand.
    • You may take captives from them.
11. 21:11
    • You may see among the captives a woman beautiful in form.
    • You may desire her.
    • You may take her for yourself as a wife.
12. 21:12
    • Then you shall bring her into your house.
    • She shall shave her head.
    • She shall do her nails, either trimming them or letting them grow.
13. 21:13
    • She shall remove from herself the clothing of her captivity.
    • She shall remain in your house.
    • She shall mourn her father and her mother for a full month.
    • After that you may go in to her.
    • You may become her husband.
    • She shall be your wife.
14. 21:14
    • If you take no delight in her, this rule applies.
    • You shall send her away to go where she wishes.
    • You shall not sell her for money.
    • You shall not treat her as merchandise or as a slave.
    • The reason is that you have humbled her.
15. 21:15
    • A man may have two wives.
    • One of the wives is loved.
    • The other wife is hated.
    • Both the loved wife and the hated wife may bear him sons.
    • The firstborn son may belong to the hated wife.
16. 21:16
    • On the day the man wills his property to his sons, this rule applies.
    • He may not treat the son of the loved wife as firstborn in preference to the son of the hated wife.
    • The son of the hated wife is the actual firstborn.
17. 21:17
    • He shall acknowledge the firstborn, the son of the hated wife.
    • He shall give that son a double portion of everything he possesses.
    • That son is the first of his father's strength.
    • The right of the firstborn belongs to that son.
18. 21:18
    • A man may have a stubborn and rebellious son.
    • The son does not obey the voice of his father.
    • The son does not obey the voice of his mother.
    • They discipline him.
    • He still does not listen to them.
19. 21:19
    • Then his father and his mother shall seize him.
    • They shall bring him out to the elders of his city.
    • They shall bring him to the gate of his place.
20. 21:20
    • They shall say to the elders of his city that this is their son.
    • They shall say that he is stubborn and rebellious.
    • They shall say that he does not obey their voice.
    • They shall say that he is a glutton.
    • They shall say that he is a drunkard.
21. 21:21
    • All the men of his city shall stone him with stones.
    • He shall die.
    • So you shall purge the evil from among you.
    • All Israel shall hear.
    • All Israel shall fear.
22. 21:22
    • A man may have committed a sin deserving the sentence of death.
    • He is put to death.
    • You hang him on a tree or piece of wood.
23. 21:23
    • His corpse shall not remain overnight on the tree.
    • You shall certainly bury him on that same day.
    • The reason is that a hanged man is a curse of God, an expression that may mean he is cursed by God or that he is an affront to God.
    • You shall not defile your land.
    • The LORD your God is giving you that land as an inheritance.

Words Worth Explaining

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

21:1

Under Israelite law, blood that was shed and never answered for was held to pollute the land and to leave guilt resting on the nearest community until it was formally dealt with. The ceremony described here is the procedure by which a town clears itself of responsibility for a killing it did not commit and cannot solve.

21:2

The "elders" were the senior heads of households, who together acted as a town's governing body and its local court; the "judges" were appointed officials. Measuring the distances is a legal step, fixing which town the case falls to.

21:3

A heifer is a young cow that has not yet had a calf. Animals set apart for sacred use had to be ones never put to ordinary work; a yoke is the wooden bar laid across an animal's neck to harness it to a plow or cart.

21:4

The Hebrew phrase behind "valley with running water" is disputed: it can mean a valley with a stream that never dries up, or a hard, stony, barren valley (the King James has "rough valley"). Either way the site is ground no one farms, land outside ordinary human use.

21:5

Levi was one of the twelve tribes of Israel; its men held no farmland and served at the sanctuary, and the priests came from among them, so "the sons of Levi" means members of that tribe. The King James "every stroke" translates a Hebrew word for a blow or bodily injury: cases of assault.

21:6

Washing the hands in public, in front of witnesses, was a formal legal gesture declaring that you had no part in a crime. It is the physical counterpart of the sworn statement in the next verse.

21:8

"Set free" renders a word the King James gives as "redeemed": to buy back or ransom, the term used for paying a price to release a slave or a captive. It refers here to Israel being brought out of slavery in Egypt.

21:10

What follows is a law about women taken prisoner in war. In the ancient world captured women were normally treated as property to be used or sold at will. This law does not abolish that, but it puts limits on it: a waiting period, a mourning period, marriage rather than simple use, and a ban on ever selling her.

21:11

In war, people who were captured usually became slaves for life. This law says a captured woman could not simply be taken as property.

21:12

Shaving the head, cutting the nails and changing clothes were recognized signs of mourning and of passing from one condition of life to another. Together they mark the end of her status as a prisoner of war and the beginning of a new place in the household; readers have long differed over whether the acts are chiefly mourning rites or rites of cleansing.

21:13

A full month was a standard formal period of mourning for the dead. The law assumes her parents are lost to her, killed in the war or left behind for good.

21:14

"Dishonored" renders the King James "humbled": a Hebrew verb meaning to force down or degrade, regularly used of taking a woman sexually. The legal consequence is that, having taken her as a wife, he can never afterwards treat her as property that can be sold.

21:15

In Hebrew legal language the pair "loved" and "hated" often means preferred and less preferred rather than affection and hatred, the same pair is used of Jacob's two wives. The point is the man's ranking of the two households, not necessarily his feelings.

21:16

When a father died, his land and animals were shared out among his sons.

21:17

A "double share" means twice what each of the other sons receives, not two-thirds of the whole: with three sons the property is divided into four parts and the eldest takes two. "The first proof of his father's strength" translates a Hebrew idiom, literally "the firstfruits of his vigour," for the first child a man fathers. Along with the extra share, the firstborn normally became head of the family after his father.

21:19

The gateway of a walled town was a wide open space where the elders sat, business was done and lawsuits were heard in public. Bringing him "to the gate" means bringing him to court.

21:20

"Glutton and drunkard" is a fixed Hebrew pairing describing someone who squanders the household's resources on food and drink, a single charge of ruinous waste rather than two separate accusations.

21:21

"Clear the evil out from among you" is a recurring formula in Deuteronomy, marking the close of a capital law: the community removes the offense from itself by carrying out the sentence publicly, with the whole town taking part.

21:22

In Israelite law hanging on a tree was not the method of execution. The person was first put to death, usually by stoning, and the body was then hung up in public as a display, which is why the following verse concerns how long the corpse may be left there.

21:23

The Hebrew here is compressed and ambiguous, literally "a curse of God": it can mean that the man hanging there is under God's curse, or that a body left hanging is itself an affront to God. Leaving a corpse unburied was in any case regarded as making the land unclean.