Deuteronomy 25: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Moses gives a set of rules for daily life in Israel. They cover fair court judgments and a limit on how many lashes a punished person can receive, not muzzling an ox as it works, and the duty of a dead man's brother to marry the widow and continue the dead man's family line, plus the public shaming of a brother who refuses. The chapter also sets a penalty for a woman who grabs a man's genitals to rescue her husband from him, requires honest weights and measures, and commands Israel to wipe out the memory of Amalek once God gives them rest in the land.

Claim by Claim

1. 25:1
   • A dispute may arise between men.
   • The men with the dispute are to come to judgment.
   • Judges are to judge between them.
   • The judges are to declare the righteous one in the right.
   • The judges are to declare the guilty one in the wrong.
2. 25:2
   • The guilty man may deserve to be beaten.
   • The judge shall make him lie down.
   • He shall be beaten in the judge's presence.
   • The beating shall be in proportion to his guilt.
   • The blows shall be given by a set count.
3. 25:3
   • He may be given forty blows.
   • The one beating him shall not exceed forty.
   • Exceeding forty would mean beating him with many blows beyond that number.
   • If he were beaten beyond that number, your brother would be degraded in your sight.
4. 25:4
   • You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out grain.
5. 25:5
   • Brothers may dwell together.
   • One of the brothers may die.
   • The dead brother may have no son.
   • The wife of the dead man shall not marry outside the family to a stranger.
   • Her husband's brother shall go in to her.
   • Her husband's brother shall take her to himself as wife.
   • Her husband's brother shall perform the duty of a brother-in-law for her.
6. 25:6
   • The firstborn she bears shall be established under the name of the dead brother.
   • The dead brother's name shall not be blotted out of Israel.
7. 25:7
   • The man may not desire to take his brother's widow.
   • In that case the widow is to go up to the gate to the elders.
   • She is to say that her husband's brother refuses to raise up a name for his brother in Israel.
   • She is to say that he is not willing to perform the duty of a brother-in-law for her.
8. 25:8
   • The elders of his city shall summon him.
   • The elders shall speak to him.
   • He may stand his ground.
   • He may say that he does not desire to take her.
9. 25:9
   • His brother's widow shall approach him in the sight of the elders.
   • She shall pull his sandal off his foot.
   • She shall spit in his face.
   • She shall declare that this is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother's house.
10. 25:10
    • His name shall be called in Israel the house of him whose sandal was pulled off.
11. 25:11
    • Men may fight together, a man and his brother.
    • The wife of one of them may come near to rescue her husband from the hand of the one striking him.
    • She may put out her hand.
    • She may seize the man's genitals.
12. 25:12
    • You shall cut off her hand.
    • Your eye shall not pity her.
13. 25:13
    • You shall not have in your bag two different weights, a large one and a small one.
14. 25:14
    • You shall not have in your house two different measures, a large one and a small one.
15. 25:15
    • You shall have a full and honest weight.
    • You shall have a full and honest measure.
    • Having full and honest weights and measures is so that your days may be long on the land.
    • The LORD your God is giving you that land.
16. 25:16
    • Everyone who does such things is an abomination to the LORD your God.
    • Everyone who acts unjustly is an abomination to the LORD your God.
17. 25:17
    • You are to remember what Amalek did to you.
    • Amalek did it to you on the way.
    • It happened when you came out of Egypt.
18. 25:18
    • Amalek encountered you on the way.
    • Amalek struck at those trailing behind you.
    • Those struck were all the feeble ones at your rear.
    • You were faint and weary at the time.
    • Amalek did not fear God.
19. 25:19
    • The LORD your God will give you rest from all your enemies round about.
    • The rest will come in the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess.
    • When that rest comes, you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
    • You shall not forget.

Words Worth Explaining

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

25:1

Israelite courts met in public, usually at the town gate, and were run by the elders of the town rather than by professional judges. The King James "justify the righteous, and condemn the wicked" is legal language, not moral praise: it means declare the innocent party in the right and give judgment against the guilty one.

25:2

The beating happened in front of the judge who ordered it, and the number of lashes was set by the offense. That is the point of the rule: punishment was public, supervised, and counted out, not left to whoever was holding the whip.

25:3

Forty was the ceiling, not the sentence; the judge set the actual number by the offense. Because a miscount would break the law, later Jewish practice fixed the maximum at thirty-nine lashes to leave a margin for error. "Thy brother" in the King James does not mean a blood brother but a fellow Israelite, the man being flogged is still a member of the community, and the limit exists to keep the punishment from stripping him of standing.

25:4

"Corn" in the King James means grain of any kind, wheat or barley here, not maize, which was unknown in Europe in 1611. Threshing was done by driving oxen in circles over the cut stalks spread on a hard, flat threshing floor, so that their hooves knocked the edible kernels loose from the husks. A muzzled ox would work all day surrounded by food it could not eat.

25:5

This is the custom scholars call levirate marriage, from the Latin *levir*, "husband's brother." A widow with no son had no claim on her dead husband's land and no one to support her in old age, and her husband's share of the family property would pass to his brothers and his name vanish from the records. "Brothers dwell together" points to brothers still holding the family land undivided. The Hebrew word translated "child" in the King James is the ordinary word for a son; whether a daughter would satisfy the law is not spelled out here.

25:6

The first son of this marriage was counted legally as the dead man's son, not the living brother's: he would inherit the dead man's portion of land and carry his name in the family and clan records. To have one's "name put out of Israel" meant the line ending and the ancestral plot passing permanently to someone else.

25:7

The open square just inside a town's gate was where legal and commercial business was done: the elders (the heads of the leading families, who served as the local court) sat there, and any transaction needing witnesses happened in public view. A widow bringing her case there was going to court.

25:9

Both acts are public shaming, and the sandal carries a further sense: in the ancient Near East, handing over or removing a sandal marked the surrender of a claim to property or of a right one held (the same gesture appears in Ruth 4:7-8, where it is explicitly described as the customary way of confirming a transaction). By pulling off his sandal the widow strips him of the claim he refused to exercise. Spitting in the face was among the sharpest insults available.

25:10

The insult attaches not just to him but to his household, as a permanent nickname carried by his descendants. The refusal was legal, the law does not compel him, but it came at the cost of public contempt.

25:11

The concern behind the law is almost certainly injury that would leave the man unable to father children, which in a society organized around inherited land and family lines was a permanent loss to his whole household, not only to him.

25:12

This is the only law in the five books of Moses that prescribes cutting off a part of the body as a penalty, and it has been read two ways since antiquity. Taken at face value it is literal mutilation. Many interpreters, ancient and modern, take it instead as a set formula for a fixed compensation payment, on the analogy of other laws in the surrounding chapters. The Hebrew leaves both readings open. "Thine eye shall not pity" is a stock legal phrase meaning the court must not reduce the penalty out of sympathy.

25:13

Merchants carried a set of shaped stone weights in a pouch and weighed goods against them on a balance scale. The Hebrew reads literally "a stone and a stone", the fraud is keeping two sets, using the heavier stones when buying (so you receive more) and the lighter ones when selling (so you hand over less). There were no standard sealed weights issued by an authority to check them against.

25:14

Dry goods like grain were sold by volume, poured into a container of fixed size, the common ones were the ephah, roughly half a bushel or about twenty liters, and its smaller divisions. The Hebrew again reads "an ephah and an ephah": a large container for taking payment in kind, a small one for paying out.

25:16

"Abomination" translates a Hebrew word meaning something utterly repellent, the strongest term of rejection the language has. It is the same word used elsewhere for practices Israel is told to have nothing to do with, and here it is applied to rigged scales.

25:17

The Amalekites were a nomadic people ranging over the dry country south of Canaan, in the Negev and Sinai. The attack referred to here is the one described in Exodus 17, shortly after Israel left Egypt.

25:18

"The hindmost" are the stragglers at the tail of a migrating column, the exhausted, the sick, the old, those who could not keep pace and had no fighting men around them. The point of the description is that Amalek struck the defenseless rather than meeting the column head-on.

25:19

"Rest from all thine enemies" means the point at which the land is secure and the fighting over, the command is deferred until then, not for immediate action. To "blot out the remembrance" of a people meant erasing the name itself: no descendants, no memorial, nothing left to be remembered by. "From under heaven" is an idiom for "anywhere on earth."