★★ This verse completes a formula the project has been following since Genesis, and completing it is what the previous chapter promised. Chelek ve-nachalah — portion and inheritance, the allotted share and the heritable landholding — stands in six verses of the Hebrew Bible, and with this chapter all six are on these pages. Five of them are about Levi: 10:9, 12:12, 14:27, 14:29, and this one. ⭐ The sixth is the first, and it is not about Levi at all. At Genesis 31:14 Rachel and Leah answer their husband: is there still any portion or inheritance for us in our father’s house? Two disinherited women coined the phrase; a landless tribe inherited it.

And the scope widens one last time here. Chapter 12 and chapter 14 used it of the Levite in your gates — one man, a dependant listed beside the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Chapter 10 said it of the tribe. This verse says the priests the Levites, the whole tribe of Levi, and pairs the denial with a positive: they eat the fire-offerings. The landlessness has stopped being a hardship to be offset by charity and become a job description.

★★ Verse 2 quietly changes number, and eleven of the thirteen witnesses change it back. The Hebrew moves from a plural in v1 (they shall eat) to a singular in v2: no inheritance for him, among his brothers, Jehovah is his inheritance, as he has spoken to him. That is the same singular 10:9 uses, and this translation keeps it in both places. The KJV reads ‘Therefore shall they have no inheritance among their brethren’; the ASV, Geneva, Douay, NIV, TLB, the RV 1909, the RV60 and the NVI («Los levitas no tendrán herencia entre sus hermanos») all pluralise it too. Two do not — the NWT 1984, ‘no inheritance should come to belong to him in the midst of his brothers’, and the TNM 1987, «ninguna herencia debe llegar a pertenecerle en medio de sus hermanos».

⭐ And each of those two is abandoned by its own later revision — the NWT’s 2013 edition prints ‘they should have no inheritance in the midst of their brothers’, and the TNM 2019 «no tendrán ninguna herencia en medio de sus hermanos». That is another instance of the pattern Deuteronomy 5 flagged and asked to be counted deliberately — chapters 6, 7, 11 and 13 have each logged at least one since, so the running total is well past the handful chapter 5 itself found: on this shelf the 1984 and 1987 editions keep a Hebrew feature and their own 2013 and 2019 revisions smooth it away, every time with the older edition the more literal one.

★ ‘As he has spoken to him’ is a footnote pointing at a verse this project already carries. The clause claims a prior speech, and Numbers 18:20 is where it was made — to Aaron, in the first person: in their land you shall have no inheritance, and no portion shall be yours among them. I am your portion and your inheritance. Deuteronomy reports it in the third person and extends it from one priest to a whole tribe.

★★ The priest’s cut here does not match the priest’s cut anywhere else in the Torah, and the parts do not even overlap. Leviticus 7:31–34 assigns the priest the breast and the right thigh, and Numbers 18:18 repeats it — as the wave-breast and as the right thigh. Deuteronomy assigns the zeroa, the shoulder; the lechayayim, the two cheeks; and the qevah, the maw. Neither list contains a single item from the other. ⚠ This translation does not harmonise them and does not need to: two bodies of law with two schedules of dues is a difference the text puts on the page, and the honest report is that the readings differ. ⭐ The one bridge is Numbers 6:19–20, where the Nazirite’s ram gives the priest a boiled shoulder together with the breast and the thigh — so the shoulder is a known priestly portion; it is simply never the whole of one.

★★ The maw pays a debt from Numbers 25. That chapter’s note flagged an unusual coincidence and pointed forward to a verse it could not yet reach: a consonantal search for qubbah returns just one other verse. This is that verse. The three letters that spell the chamber Phinehas walked into, and the belly he ran a spear through, spell here a butcher’s term for the fourth stomach of a ruminant, itemised on a receipt. ⚠ The lexicons list these as separate entries, so the claim is about letters and not about anybody’s intention — but the letters are what a Hebrew reader meets, and Numbers 25 made its whole reading of a violent verse out of them.

The shelf finds this hard, and one witness comes up a body part short. KJV, ASV and Geneva all read ‘the shoulder, and the two cheeks, and the maw’ — three items, and ‘maw’ is now nearly as dead a word as the KJV’s ‘evilfavouredness’ one chapter back. The NWT 1984 is anatomically precise with ‘the shoulder blade and the jaws and the stomach’; the TLB plain with ‘The shoulder, the cheeks, and the stomach’. The NIV dissolves the anatomy into a butcher’s summary — ‘the shoulder, the internal organs and the meat from the head’ — and the NVI does the same in Spanish with «la espaldilla, las quijadas y los órganos internos». ⭐ The Spanish shelf has the best word on either side: the RV 1909’s «la espalda, y las quijadas, y el cuajar» and the RV60’s «la espaldilla, las quijadas y el cuajar» both use cuajar, which is the ordinary Spanish name for exactly this organ and needs no gloss.

⚠ And the Douay-Rheims prints two items where the Hebrew has three — ‘they shall give to the priest the shoulder and the breast’. The cheeks are gone, and what replaces them is the breast: the portion Leviticus 7:31 assigns and Deuteronomy pointedly does not. The Douay translates the Vulgate rather than the Hebrew, which is where its divergences usually begin; this page has not gone behind it to the Latin, so that is as far as the trail is followed here. Whatever produced it, the effect is a shelf version quietly harmonising Deuteronomy to Leviticus in the one verse where they disagree.

A country Levite may walk to the sanctuary and take an equal share of the altar, and nobody at the sanctuary may treat him as a visitor. This is the practical consequence of chapter 12: once sacrifice happens in one place only, the Levites scattered through the towns are cut off from the thing they exist to do. Verses 6–8 open the door and then bolt it open — share for share, the same words twice, which in Hebrew is how you say ‘no lesser portion for the newcomer’.

★ He comes with all the craving of his soul, and it is the phrase Deuteronomy has been using about meat. Avvat nafsh- is a strong word for appetite. Searched consonantally it stands in eight verses of the Hebrew Bible, and reading them sorts them: six are this phrase — four in Deuteronomy, of which three are 12:15, 12:20 and 12:21, all about how much meat you may eat — plus 1 Samuel 23:20 and Jeremiah 2:24; the other two spell the near-synonym ta’avat nafsh- (Isaiah 26:8, Psalm 10:3). ⭐ So the same three words are a quantity in chapter 12 — where this translation reads as much as your soul desires — and an intensity here, and a genuinely feral thing at Jeremiah 2:24, where a wild donkey sniffs the wind in her craving. Everywhere else in the six the craving is for food, for a fugitive, or for the wind; here it is for a place of worship.

⚠⚠ Verse 8’s second half is the hardest clause in the chapter and probably in this stretch of the book. Levad mimkarav al-ha-avot — four words, and the middle one, mimkarav, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, this one. It is built on the ordinary verb to sell, so it means his sales, or the things he has sold, or the proceeds of them; al-ha-avot means ‘upon’ or ‘concerning the fathers’, which is how Hebrew says ancestral. What that adds up to is not recoverable with confidence, and the shelf’s spread is the evidence.

Four readings, and they are not variations on one idea. The KJV takes it as property already disposed of — ‘beside that which cometh of the sale of his patrimony’ — the ASV prints the same clause with ‘besides that which cometh of the sale of his patrimony’, and the NWT 1984 agrees, ‘besides what he gets from things he sells of his ancestral goods’. The NIV reads the same words as a concession against him: ‘even though he has received money from the sale of family possessions’ — the equal share is granted despite the sale, not in addition to it. The Douay relocates the whole thing to his home town, ‘besides that which is due to him in his own city, by succession from his fathers’. And the Spanish shelf declines to decide at all: the RV 1909 has «además de sus patrimonios» and the NVI «además de su patrimonio familiar», which say only that he keeps whatever else he has. ⚠ This translation prints a real English sentence rather than a hyphenated dodge, and the range is here rather than in the verse; the reason it can afford to is that nothing legal turns on it — the ruling is the first half, and the first half is not in doubt.

Eight participles, and the first one is not divination at all. The list runs: one who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire; qosem qesamim; me’onen; menachesh; mekhashef; chover chaver; one who asks an ov and a yidde’oni; and one who inquires of the dead. Child sacrifice heads a list of ways of finding things out, with no connective and no explanation, and the chapter never returns to it. Deuteronomy 12:31 had already said the nations burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods; here the same practice is filed under enquiry.

★ Two of the eight are cognate doublings, and this translation keeps both audible. Qosem qesamim is a diviner divining divinations; chover chaver is a binder binding a binding. ⚠ The second is the one worth stopping on, because the root is the most ordinary word in the language for being someone’s friend — chaver is a companion, and the verb is what joins two things. The sinister sense is a specialisation of it: to tie a person up with words. The phrase chover chaver stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, this one, though Psalm 58:6 has the plural of the same idiom.

⚠ Where each word goes, checked rather than assumed. Qosem qesamim stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible — but qesem alone is the noun the elders of Moab and Midian carried in their hands to hire Balaam (Numbers 22:7), and it is one of the two things Balaam then denied Israel had (Numbers 23:23). Menachesh is the other one: the omen-reading Joseph claimed for himself at Genesis 44:15. ⭐ So two of the eight forbidden practices are named, by this book’s own canon, in the mouths of a patriarch and a hired diviner, and the diviner is the one who denies them. Yidde’oni stands in ten verses, and the company is exact: Leviticus 19:31, 20:6 and 20:27, this verse, the witch of En-dor twice, Manasseh, Josiah’s purge, and Isaiah twice. Doresh el ha-metim, inquiring of the dead, stands in one verse, and ma’avir beno, making his son pass through, in one.

★★ Ov is a word that will not settle into either a person or a thing, and this project has already had to render it both ways. At Leviticus 19:31 and 20:6 the idiom is turning to them and this translation printed ‘mediums and spiritists’; at Leviticus 20:27 a person has one and it printed ‘a ghost or a familiar spirit’. Here somebody asks one, which is the same grammar as 20:27, so the same English is used. ⚠ The shelf has the identical difficulty: the KJV reads ‘a consulter with familiar spirits’, the ASV ‘a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard’, the NIV ‘who is a medium or spiritist’, the NWT 1984 ‘a professional foreteller of events’, and the Douay reaches for Greek mythology with ‘consulteth pythonic spirits’ — the oracle at Delphi, imported into Moab. Yidde’oni is built on the verb to know, so the least interpretative thing to say about it is that it is a knowing one.

⭐ The 1599 Geneva puts a Roman priest in the list. For menachesh the Geneva prints ‘a marker of the flying of fowls’ — augury by bird-flight, which is a specifically Roman technique and not a Hebrew one; the ASV keeps the Latin term itself with ‘one that practiseth augury’, and the NIV generalises to ‘interprets omens’. The Douay adds a method the Hebrew does not name, ‘or observeth dreams and omens’, and the TLB reaches for the twentieth century with ‘black magic’. ⚠ Every one of these is a translator supplying a technique for a word whose technique is lost. Me’onen in particular has no recoverable derivation — it has been connected to the word for a cloud, and to the word for an eye, and neither is more than a guess — which is why this translation uses the flattest available English, soothsayer, matching what it already printed at Leviticus 19:26.

⚠⚠ And the King James renders the masculine here with the word that has the worst history on this shelf. For mekhashef the KJV prints ‘or a witch’. The Hebrew word here is masculine; the one at Exodus 22:18 — you shall not let a sorceress live — is feminine, and it is that verse, in the King James’s wording, that was invoked for centuries to justify the European and American witch trials, as that chapter’s own note sets out with its sources. This verse is where the same English word is used of a man, in a list, with no penalty attached to it at all. Naming that is not a comment on the KJV’s honesty; a single English word covered both Hebrew genders in 1611 and has since narrowed to one of them, and the narrowing is what makes the older rendering read as something it did not say.

★★ Four Hebrew words answer the eight practitioners, and they answer them with the vocabulary of the altar. Tamim tihyeh im YHVH elohekha stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible. Tamim is the sacrificial standard — the animal brought to the altar must be tamim, unblemished, whole, and Leviticus repeats it dozens of times. ⭐ And the chapter before this one opened on exactly that: 17:1 forbids sacrificing an ox or a sheep that has a blemish in it. One chapter later the same standard is turned on the worshipper. The animal must have no defect; you must be entire. It is the same move 17:1 made in the other direction when it lent the animal’s phrase, anything bad at all, to a human offender four verses later.

‘Whole’ rather than ‘perfect’, and the shelf shows why the choice matters. KJV and ASV both read ‘Thou shalt be perfect’, and in 1611 that word still meant complete rather than flawless; four centuries later it does not, and a modern reader lands on a demand for sinlessness the Hebrew is not making. The Geneva avoids it with ‘Thou shalt be upright’; the NIV and the NWT’s 2013 revision with ‘blameless’; the NWT 1984 with ‘faultless’; the TNM 1987 with «exento de falta» and the TNM 2019 with «intachable», which the NVI also uses. The RV 1909 and RV60 keep «Perfecto serás». ⚠ The Douay uses two words for the one Hebrew word, ‘perfect, and without spot’, and in doing so says out loud what the others leave implicit: the second half is the animal.

★ Verse 14 is the hinge of the chapter and the Masoretes refused to cut it. Four scribal paragraph breaks fall in this chapter — after v2, v5, v8 and at the close — so the whole of vv9–22 is one unbroken unit of fourteen verses, and the traditional layout puts no join at all between the list of diviners and the promise of the prophet. That is an argument made by punctuation. These nations listen to soothsayers and diviners; but you — Jehovah your God has not given you such, and then, in the same paragraph, without a pause: a prophet. The prophet is not a new subject. He is the answer to the question the previous five verses raised, which is not how do you resist superstition but where does Israel go instead.

★★ ‘Like me’ is a rarer word than it looks, and its company in the Torah is remarkable. Kamoni, in this spelling, returns nine verses on a letter search and four of them are the word; in the Torah it stands three times, and this is the third. The first is Genesis 44:15, where Joseph says did you not know that a man like me indeed practises divination? — using this word, and using it of the very practice v10 has just outlawed. The second is Exodus 9:14, where God tells Pharaoh there is none like me in all the earth. ⭐ Between an Egyptian vizier claiming a diviner’s persona and a God claiming to be incomparable stands Moses, using the same word to promise a successor.

★★ Thirteen of this chapter’s twenty-two verses address a ‘you’ at all, and every marker in them is singular. Two Hebrew words are not, and they are the two the New Testament quotes. Every second-person marker in the chapter is singular — your grain, your gates, you shall not learn, you shall be whole, you shall not shrink — with one exception: elav tishma’un, to him you (pl) shall listen, at the end of v15. The verse is singular four times and then plural once, in its last two words. ⚠ Established by reading all twenty-two verses rather than by any corpus scan, for the reason chapter 17 gave when it retracted one: the scan could not be reproduced. No book-wide figure is claimed here.

⭐ Acts noticed, and pluralised the whole sentence to match. Acts 3:22 quotes this verse as Προφήτην ὑμῖν ἀναστήσει κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἐκ τῶν ἀδελφῶν ὑμῶν — a prophet for you (pl), from your (pl) brothers — where the Hebrew has the singular in both places and the plural only in the listening. Peter’s citation carries the one plural clause backwards over the whole verse. ⚠ Its second half then leaves Deuteronomy behind altogether: v19 says only I myself will require it of him, while Acts 3:23 reads shall be utterly destroyed from among the people — the sentence of being cut off from one’s people that Leviticus 23:29 and others pronounce, fused onto this promise. This page reports the fusion and does not try to name Luke’s source for it.

★★ Verse 16 quotes the people back to themselves and turns every plural singular. The request was made at Horeb, and chapter 5 records it in the first person plural: why should we die? … if we continue to hear the voice of Jehovah our God any longer, we will die (5:25 in this project’s Masoretic numbering). Here Moses quotes it as let me not go on hearing the voice of Jehovah my God … so that I do not die. A crowd’s petition has become one man’s. ⚠ Eleven of the thirteen witnesses keep the first-person singular; the NIV alone restores the crowd, ‘Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God’ — which is what chapter 5 says and what this verse does not. The thirteenth, the TLB, quotes nobody: it turns the request into indirect speech, ‘you begged that you might not have to listen’.

★ Verse 17 is quoting too, and it drops one word. Deuteronomy 5:28 has God answer they have done well in all that they have spoken; here it is they have done well in what they have spoken. ⚠ The whole exchange is anchored by a phrase that belongs to this book alone: yom ha-qahal, the day of the assembly, stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible — 9:10, 10:4 and this one — and with this chapter all three are on these pages.

★★ The office is defined by a single physical image, and one later prophet is shown receiving it. Ve-natati devarai be-fiv, I will put my words in his mouth, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible in this third-person form. Turned to the second person, devarai be-fikha stands in three — and the first of them is the moment Jeremiah 1:9 describes: Jehovah stretches out his hand, touches Jeremiah’s mouth, and says look, I have put my words in your mouth. The other two are Isaiah 51:16 and Jeremiah 5:14, where the words in the mouth become fire and the people become wood. ⭐ Jeremiah’s call chapter is on these pages and its own note already named this verse as the mark of the true prophet; the promise and the fulfilment can now be read against each other.

A prophet is not defined here by foresight, by ecstasy, or by signs. He is defined by having somebody else’s words in his mouth, and the whole of vv18–22 follows from that one clause: if the words are given, disregarding them is answerable to the giver (v19); if they are not given, saying them is capital (v20); and the test in v22 is simply whether they behaved like words that were given.

★★ Verse 20 pays the sharpest phrase of the previous chapter, one chapter later, exactly where that chapter said it would. 17:3 condemned the man who worships the sun, the moon or the host of the heavens — asher lo tzivviti, which I did not command — and noted that of that phrase’s five verses, two carry a pronoun. Asher lo tzivvitiv, which I did not command him, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, and it is this one. ⚠ The claim is narrower than the shelf usually makes it sound, and the narrowness is the point: not that the word is false, not that the gods are not there, but that the order did not come from me. The Douay supplies a motive the Hebrew withholds — the prophet ‘who being corrupted with pride, shall speak in my name things that I did not command him to say’ — and the TLB supplies a different one, ‘any prophet who falsely claims that his message is from me shall die’, which reads the man’s sincerity. Hebrew judges neither; it judges the provenance of the sentence.

★ And the verb of v19 is the verb of v11. Darash is the word for going to somebody with a question. Eight verses earlier it named the man who inquires of the dead; here God says anokhi edrosh me-immo, I myself will make the inquiry of him. ⚠ The chapter before this one used it a third way, of a court: 17:4 requires that you inquire thoroughly before anyone is touched. Three enquiries, one root: a village bench interrogating a charge, a professional interrogating a corpse, and God interrogating a man who would not listen. English needs three different verbs and this translation uses them; the note is where the thread is.

★★ Deuteronomy gives two tests for a prophet and they pull in opposite directions. This one is outcome-based: if the word does not happen, Jehovah did not speak it. Deuteronomy 13:2–4 is content-based, and it deliberately concedes the outcome first — the prophet gives a sign, the sign comes true, and he then says let us go after other gods: do not listen to him. ⚠ Put together, a fulfilled prediction proves nothing and an unfulfilled one is disqualifying, which is not a symmetry. The book is not confused; it is ranking. Content decides, and v20 says so by listing speaks in the name of other gods alongside which I did not command him before any test of outcome is offered. Verse 22 is what remains for the case where the content is unobjectionable and you still have to decide.

⚠ Its practical problem is stated by a chapter already on these pages, in a courtroom. Jeremiah 26 is a capital trial for prophecy, and its note observes what this rule cannot do: the test is whether the thing happens, which is no help to a court sitting years before the outcome. Jeremiah is acquitted on the judges’ assessment that he genuinely speaks in Jehovah’s name — the unfalsifiable question — while the priests were arguing the same category the other way.

★★ Two narratives run this test, and they run it in opposite directions. At Jeremiah 28:9 Jeremiah quotes this rule back at Hananiah in the temple — the prophet who prophesies of peace: when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that Jehovah has truly sent him — and then does not wait for it. He tells Hananiah that Jehovah has not sent him and that he will die this year, and 28:17 reports that he did, in the seventh month. ⭐ That is v20’s sentence carried out and v22’s test compressed from a lifetime into two months. ★ The other narrative turns the rule the other way round. At 1 Kings 22:28 (not yet on these pages) Micaiah, alone against about four hundred prophets, applies the criterion to himself, and in this verse’s own words — if you return at all in peace, Jehovah has not spoken by me — staking his own standing on Ahab not coming home. Ahab does not: v37 has the king dead and carried back to Samaria. ⚠ So one prophet points the test at a rival and the other points it at himself, and only the second makes it falsifiable in advance — which is exactly the difficulty Jeremiah 26’s court ran into.

★ The last two words send the reader to the first chapter of the book, and to the same anxiety. Lo tagur, you shall not shrink, stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible. The other is Deuteronomy 1:17, addressed in the plural to the judges Moses had just appointed: you shall not shrink before any man, for the judgement is God’s. ⚠ The verb is a homonym of the one in v6: the same three letters that make the Levite sojourn in a town make a citizen dread a prophet sixteen verses later, and the lexicons list them as separate roots. ⭐ The pairing is the finding: both verses are in this same book, and both legislate against fear of a person who is claiming authority — first a judge’s fear of a litigant, now a layman’s fear of a prophet. ⚠ The dread-root itself turns up once more in Deuteronomy, at 32:27 (not yet on these pages), and there it is God who is said to dread something: the taunt of an enemy. A judge’s greed is the ordinary target of law; a judge’s nerve is the harder one, and this book goes after it twice.

And the sentence closes on the previous chapter’s noun. Bezadon dibbero ha-navi — he spoke it in insolence, the word 17:12 used of the man who defies the central court, and the root of v20’s presumes. The shelf mostly gets it: RV60 «con presunción la habló el tal profeta», NVI «habrá hablado con presunción», RV 1909 «con soberbia la habló aquel profeta», and the TNM 2019 «las ha dicho con arrogancia». ⭐ The Douay alone turns the noun into an act of manufacture: ‘the prophet hath forged it by the pride of his mind’. Forged is exactly right for a word claimed to come from somewhere it did not.