★★ These four verses are a rewrite, and the thing that changed is who owns the animal. Exodus 23:4–5 (already on these pages) gives the same two laws in the same order: a stray ox to be brought back, and a collapsed donkey to be got up again. But there the animal belongs to your enemy, and then to the one who hates you — and here, four times in four verses, it belongs to your brother. The two versions are not in competition; they are the same duty measured from its two ends, and a reader who has both can see that Israel was told to do this for the man he liked least before he was told to do it for his kin.

⭐ Deuteronomy also changes the verb for what you must not do, and its replacement is the best word in the chapter. Exodus says you shall forbear (chadal) from leaving him. Deuteronomy says ve-hit’alamta — and the form is reflexive, so what gets hidden is not the ox but you. The verb stands in six verses of the Hebrew Bible, and three of them are here, v1, v3 and v4. Of the other three, one is a snowdrift hiding itself in Job, one is a psalmist asking God not to do it to him — do not hide yourself from my plea (Psalm 55:2, not yet on these pages) — and the third is Isaiah 58:7 (not yet on these pages), the great fasting chapter, which ends its list of what a real fast looks like with and that you not hide yourself from your own flesh. The word Deuteronomy uses of a neighbour’s ox is the word Isaiah uses of your own family and the word a man in trouble is afraid God will use of him.

⚠ The shelf divides on whether to keep the reflexive, and the older half wins. The KJV and the ASV both print ‘hide thyself from them’; the Geneva reads ‘withdraw thyself’ and the NWT 1984 ‘deliberately withdraw’, which keeps the deliberateness if not the hiding. The modern half turns it into a transitive verb about the animal: the NIV ‘do not ignore it’, the TLB ‘don’t pretend you didn’t see it’, the Douay ‘thou shalt not pass by’. Ignoring something is a decision about the thing; hiding yourself is a decision about yourself, and the Hebrew makes the second one.

★ And verse 3 refuses the duty in a strange grammatical key: not ‘you must not’ but ‘you cannot’. Lo tukhal lehit’alem uses yakhol, the verb of being ABLE, where a law would normally use a plain prohibition — so the sentence says that hiding is not available to you rather than that it is forbidden to you. This translation prints you are not free to hide yourself. The NWT 1984 is the only English witness that keeps the modal in view, ‘you will not be allowed to withdraw yourself’; the KJV and ASV read ‘thou mayest not’. ⭐ And the Spanish shelf splits along the same revision seam the English one does. The RV 1909 reads «no podrás retraerte de ello» and the TNM 1987 «No se te permitirá retirarte» — both turning the verb back on the subject. Each is then abandoned by its own revision: the RV60 reads «no podrás negarle tu ayuda», which converts hiding into help owed to a brother, and the TNM 2019 «No hagas como si no lo hubieras visto».

Between the two Exodus laws Deuteronomy inserts something Exodus does not have: a rule for when you cannot find the owner (v2). You take it home and keep it — not until you have advertised it, but until your brother comes seeking it, with the burden of the search left on him and the burden of the keeping left on you. And v3 widens the animal law into a law of lost property in general, naming a donkey, a cloak, and then anything of your brother’s that is lost.

★★ The two halves of this verse are not built alike, and the asymmetry is the whole difficulty. The second half is plain: a man shall not wear (yilbash, the ordinary verb for putting on clothes) a woman’s simlah, which is a specific garment — the outer wrap. The first half uses neither a clothing word nor a wearing verb. It says that keli gever shall not be upon a woman, and keli is Hebrew’s broadest word for a manufactured thing: a vessel, a tool, a weapon, a piece of equipment. The pairing stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, so there is no second occurrence to settle it from.

⚠ Which is why this verse has been read as three different laws — against costume, against a woman bearing arms, and against a cultic transvestism attested elsewhere in the ancient Near East. This translation does not choose between them. It prints gear, which is what the Hebrew word covers, and leaves the reader where the Hebrew leaves him. The other noun in the clause pulls the same way: gever is not the neutral ish, ‘man’, but the word for a man in his strength, the one behind ‘mighty man’.

⭐ The shelf preserves the asymmetry in its older witnesses and flattens it in the newer ones — and it flattens along the revision seam, version by version. The KJV and the ASV both decline to name the thing at all: ‘that which pertaineth unto a man’ against ‘a woman’s garment’, so the two halves stay unlike. The Geneva does the same with ‘raiment’ on the second side only. The NWT 1984 keeps two different English words, ‘garb’ and ‘mantle’; so does the TNM 1987, «ropaje» and «manto»; and the RV 1909 has «hábito de hombre» against «ropa de mujer». Now read each of those against its own later revision: the NWT 2013 gives ‘the clothing of a man’ and ‘the clothing of a woman’, the TNM 2019 «la ropa de un hombre» and «la de una mujer», the RV60 «traje» against «ropa» and the NVI «ropa» against «ropa». The NIV and the TLB print ‘men’s clothing’ and ‘women’s clothing’. Every revision in the last century has moved the same direction, toward a tidier sentence and a narrower law.

⚠ And the Douay does something none of the others do: it ends the verse ‘abominable before God’, dropping the divine name that the Hebrew puts there. To’avat YHVH, an abomination to Jehovah, stands in eight verses of Deuteronomy, and this is the fifth of them. ⚠ Five of the eight, this one among them, add your God; 12:31, 18:12 and 27:15 leave the name bare. The phrase is the book’s heaviest verdict — it has already fallen on idol silver, on child sacrifice, on a blemished offering and on divination. It falls here on a garment, with no reason given.

★★ The reward attached to letting the mother bird go is, word for word, the reward attached to honouring your father and your mother — and no other single commandment in the book gets it. Deuteronomy 5:15 (already on these pages) promises the one who honours his parents that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you. Verse 7 here promises that it may go well with you, and you may prolong your days — the same two clauses, in the other order. Searched across Deuteronomy, the ‘it may go well with you’ formula stands in seven verses, but only three of them also carry the length-of-days half, and one of those three is 4:40, a general charge to keep all the statutes rather than a single law. That leaves two actual commandments holding the identical promise: honour your parents, and send the mother bird away.

⭐ The pairing is old and famous in Jewish reading, where it is used to argue that a reader cannot rank commandments by their apparent weight — the heaviest and the lightest are paid the same wage. That discussion is reported here rather than quoted, but the textual fact under it is checkable and stands on its own. ⚠ Note also what Deuteronomy has done to its own source: Exodus 20:11 (already on these pages) gives the parents commandment only the length-of-days half. The clause that ties the two laws together is one Deuteronomy added.

★ The verb for what you do to the mother is the one this chapter will twice forbid. Shalle’ach teshallach, doubled for emphasis — you shall certainly send her away. That intensive form of the verb stands in three verses of this chapter: here, and then at v19 and v29, where a man may not send her away all his days. It is the ordinary Hebrew for divorce. And it arrives out of the chapter just before, where 21:14 used it of the captive woman a man no longer wants. A bird must be released; two women may not be.

⚠ One witness deletes the reward outright. The TLB replaces both clauses with ‘The Lord will bless you for it’ — which is a fair summary and removes the only words that connect this law to the Decalogue. The Geneva substitutes ‘that thou mayest prosper’ for ‘that it may be well with thee’, and so weakens the same link by half; every other witness on both shelves keeps the two clauses.

★★ The word for the thing you must build appears nowhere else. Ma’aqeh stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, this one. Nothing else in the Bible describes it, and the shelf reconstructs it from the situation rather than from the language: a ‘battlement’ in the KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay, a ‘parapet’ in the NWT 1984, the NIV and the TNM, a «pretil» in the RV 1909 and the RV60, a «baranda» in the NVI, and the TLB reads ‘guardrail’. The roof of an Israelite house was flat and was used — for sleeping, drying, storing, talking — which is why the law is about a roof and not a cliff.

⭐ And the reason clause is built on a pun the Hebrew makes on purpose. Ki yippol ha-nofel mimmennu stands in one verse: when the faller falls from it, a participle and a finite verb of the same root laid side by side, so the sentence names the man by the accident before the accident happens. It is not fatalism; it is Hebrew’s ordinary way of making a category — the one who does the falling. Two witnesses keep it and both are the same translation in two languages: the NWT 1984’s ‘because someone falling might fall from it’ and the TNM 1987’s «porque alguien que cayera llegara a caer de él». Every other witness on both shelves smooths it to ‘if any man fall’. ⚠ And each of those two is abandoned by its own revision — the 2013 reads ‘because of someone falling from it’ and the 2019 «si alguien se cae de ahí» — which is the same movement the note three verses back found at keli gever.

★ The thing you are avoiding is damim, blood in the plural, which in this book is not a stain on the floor but liability: 19:10 used it of blood that would be upon you if a road to a refuge city were not kept clear. Here the law goes one step further into ordinary life. Nobody has done anything; a man simply built a house. The blood attaches to the house, and the way to keep it off is a low wall built before anyone is hurt.

★★ Three prohibitions on mixing, and the third one is a word nobody can translate — so Deuteronomy translates it for you. Leviticus 19:19 (already on these pages) forbids breeding two kinds of cattle, sowing two kinds in a field, and wearing beged kil’ayim sha’atnez — a garment of two kinds, sha’atnez. It gives the strange word and stops. The word stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, that one and this one, and this one does what Leviticus did not: it follows the word with its content, wool and linen together. Two verses, and the second is the first one’s dictionary. That is why this translation prints the Hebrew word here and lets the verse gloss it, as the verse does.

⚠ Sha’atnez is almost certainly not a Hebrew word at all — the consonant shape is wrong for a native root, and Egyptian and other loans have been proposed without agreement. This is one of the honest gaps, and the shelf reflects it by translating the definition rather than the word: the KJV and the Geneva read ‘a garment of divers sorts’; the ASV reads ‘a mingled stuff’; the NWT 1984 reads ‘mixed stuff’; and the RV 1909 reads «de mistura». Not one of the thirteen prints the word.

⭐ The vineyard law’s penalty clause says the opposite of what most of the shelf prints. Pen tiqdash stands in one verse, and the verb is qadash — to become HOLY. The mixed crop is not ruined; it is made sacred, which in practice means it is forfeited, because a holy thing cannot be eaten by its owner. Four witnesses print the reverse of the Hebrew word and say the crop is defiled: the KJV, the Geneva, the NIV and the RV 1909 («no se deprave»). Two report a neutral loss with no reason for it — the ASV’s ‘forfeited’ and the RV60’s «se pierda todo». Six keep the direction of the Hebrew by naming where the crop goes: the NWT 1984 and the TNM 1987 and 2019 send it to the sanctuary; the TLB reads ‘confiscated by the priests’; the NVI reads «consagrar a Dios»; and the Douay, alone, simply prints the verb, ‘be sanctified together’. On this clause the version that follows the Latin is the most literal one on the shelf.

★ And Deuteronomy’s three mixing laws are not Leviticus’s three. Leviticus forbids mixed breeding, a mixed field, and mixed cloth. Deuteronomy drops the breeding rule, narrows the field to a vineyard, adds a rule Leviticus does not have — plowing with an ox and a donkey together — and keeps the cloth. The word kil’ayim itself stands in two verses, this one and Leviticus 19:19; a third hit on the same three consonants, Isaiah 42:22, is the unrelated word for prisons. No reason is given for any of the three, here or there, which has left the field open for two thousand years of explanation — that the laws guard the created boundaries of Genesis 1, that they protect the priesthood’s monopoly on mixed cloth, that they are simply arbitrary and meant to be. The text says none of it.

★★ This is the second of the Bible’s two tassel commandments, and it does not use the first one’s word. Numbers 15:38 (already on these pages) commands tzitzit on the kanfei of your garments, with a cord of blue, and gives a reason: you shall see them and remember. This verse commands gedilim on the four kanfot of your covering, with no blue and no reason at all. The observance that grew from the two is called by the Numbers word; the verse that fixes the number at four is this one.

⭐ And gedilim is not a garment word. Read out of the fifty-odd hits its three consonants return — nearly all of them gedolim, ‘great’, or migdalim, ‘towers’ — the noun stands in two verses: this one, and 1 Kings 7:17 (not yet on these pages), where it names the chain-work wreathed over the capitals of the two bronze pillars at the door of Solomon’s temple. The cords on the corner of a man’s cloak and the ornament on the temple’s front pillars are the same word. Nothing in either verse points at the other; the vocabulary does it silently.

★ Kanaf is a wing. That is its ordinary meaning — the wing of a bird, and the corner of a garment only by extension, the part that hangs loose. The plural kanfot stands in five verses, and this is the only one where it belongs to a garment. The other four are all the ends of the world, and two of them are counted exactly the way this verse counts — the four corners of the earth at Isaiah 11:12 and Ezekiel 7:2; the remaining two drop the number, lightning reaching the ends of the earth at Job 37:3 and the dawn told to seize them at Job 38:13 (none of the four yet on these pages). A man is told to put cords on the four corners of the thing he wraps himself in, in the phrase the Bible otherwise saves for the four corners of everything.

★ And one of those four verses quietly holds this chapter’s other end as well. Isaiah 11:12 gathers nidchei Yisrael — the DRIVEN-OUT of Israel — from the four kanfot of the earth, and nidchei is the participle this chapter opened with, eleven verses earlier, of an ox driven astray (v1). The stray animal you are forbidden to walk past and the scattered nation God promises to collect are described by the same word, and Isaiah puts it in the same sentence as the four corners.

⚠ The shelf splits four ways on kanfot and one witness moves the number. ‘Quarters’ in the KJV and Geneva, ‘borders’ in the ASV, ‘extremities’ in the NWT 1984, ‘corners’ in the NIV, TLB and Douay, «cabos» in the RV 1909 and «puntas» in the RV60. ⭐ And the NVI alone detaches the four from the corners and attaches it to the cords: «Pon cuatro borlas en las puntas del manto», four tassels on the corners, where the Hebrew has cords — number unstated — on the four corners. It is a small move and it relocates the only number in the verse.

★★ The phrase for what the husband invents is built from a word that elsewhere means God’s mighty acts. Alilot devarim stands in two verses, v14 and v17 of this chapter — the accusation made, and the accusation quoted back at him by his father-in-law. The head noun is not rare, and its usual company is exalted: make known his alilot among the peoples is how Isaiah 12:4 and 1 Chronicles 16:8 both put it (neither yet on these pages), of the acts of God. A deed so large it is worth publishing, and a fabricated charge, are one Hebrew noun. This translation prints trumped-up charges, which is the sense; the literal is closer to ‘wanton deeds of words’, and not one of the thirteen witnesses prints anything like it — all thirteen render the effect instead, from slander to misconduct to shameful things. The KJV gives up most gracefully, reading ‘give occasions of speech against her’. ⭐ The one witness on either shelf that keeps the devarim, the WORDS, inside the accusation is the RV60, which reads «faltas que den que hablar» — faults that give people something to talk about — where the RV 1909 it revised had only «le pusiere algunas faltas».

⭐ The chapter’s quiet thread is a cloak, and it runs through three completely different laws. The word simlah stands in three verses here: at v3 it is a lost cloak you are obliged to keep safe until its owner comes for it; at v5 it is a woman’s cloak a man may not put on; and at v17 it is the cloth spread out in the city gate as the evidence that decides a marriage. The same ordinary object is property, boundary and proof within twelve verses.

⚠ And at the third of those the shelf decides an open question inside the verse. The Hebrew at v17 says the parents spread out the simlah — a cloak, the garment word. Whether that cloth is bedding from the wedding night or evidence of a first menstruation is an old argument the text does not settle, and five witnesses leave it unsettled by printing the garment: the ASV reads ‘the garment’, the Geneva ‘the vesture’, the NWT 1984 ‘the mantle’, the RV60 «la vestidura» and the TNM 1987 «el manto». Three neutralise it: the KJV, the Douay and the NIV all read ‘the cloth’. And two put the reader in a bedroom — the RV 1909 and the NVI both read «la sábana», a bedsheet. ⭐ The TLB goes past all of them and writes in what no Hebrew manuscript contains: ‘the blood-stained sheet from her marriage bed’.

⚠ The fine has no unit. The Hebrew of v19 is me’ah kesef — a hundred of silver — and the word sheqel does not occur anywhere in this chapter; v29 is the same, chamishim kasef, fifty of silver. A weight is being counted and not named, and the shekel every English version supplies is an editorial reconstruction, almost certainly right and still not in the text. The Spanish shelf is the honest one here: «cien piezas de plata» in the RV 1909, the RV60 and the NVI all decline to name the unit, while the KJV, ASV, NIV, Geneva and NWT 1984 all print ‘shekels’. ⚠ And the TLB converts: ‘fine him one hundred dollars’.

★ The verb that opens the case is the one the chapter before spent three verses on. The husband comes to hate her — u-sne’ah, from sane, the root behind 21:15–17’s loved wife and hated wife, where Hebrew uses it for the less-loved of two rather than for active hatred. Here it cannot mean merely less-loved: the man is manufacturing evidence to have his wife killed. It is the same root at Exodus 23:5, of the one who hates you whose donkey you must still help up — which is the law this chapter opened by rewriting.

⚠ What the law actually does with the slanderer is worth reading slowly, because it is not obviously mercy for the woman. He is flogged, fined a hundred of silver paid to her father, and then required to keep her as his wife with the right of divorce permanently removed. The penalty is calculated against the man — a fine to the household he defamed, and the loss of the exit he was trying to buy. The woman’s outcome is a permanent marriage to a man who tried to have her stoned. The text does not comment.

★★ Nevalah is a fixed, formal term, and reading its occurrences settles something about this verse. The consonants also spell nevelah, a carcass, so the tally has to be read rather than matched; read out, the noun for an outrage stands in thirteen verses, and the recurring shape is a nevalah in Israel — Shechem and Dinah at Genesis 34:7 (already on these pages), Achan’s sacrilege at Joshua 7:15, the assault at Gibeah that starts a civil war in Judges 19–20, Amnon and Tamar at 2 Samuel 13:12, and the adulterous prophets at Jeremiah 29:23 (already on these pages; the others not yet). ⭐ In every one of those the outrage is something a man does, and in three of the five it is something a man does to a woman. Verse 21 is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where the verb attached to nevalah is feminine — asetah, she did it. The word the Bible uses of Shechem and of Amnon is turned, once, on the woman.

⚠ The formula that closes each case is the book’s own, and this chapter has the densest concentration of it anywhere. U-vi’arta ha-ra, you shall burn out the evil, stands in nine verses of the Hebrew Bible, every one of them in Deuteronomy — and three of the nine are here, at v21, v22 and v24. It has been used at 17:7, 19:19 and 21:21 already. Whatever else the sexual case law of this chapter is, the book files it under the same heading as apostasy, perjury and the rebellious son.

★ Verse 22 kills them both, and says so twice. Both of them shall die — the man lying with the woman, and the woman. The clause is redundant on purpose: the sentence has already said both, and then names them anyway, which is how a law forecloses an argument before it is made. ⚠ The woman is be’ulat ba’al, and the two words share a root — roughly ‘owned by an owner’, in which ba’al is simply Hebrew’s ordinary word for a husband. The pairing stands in two verses: this one, and Genesis 20:3 (already on these pages, not yet in Spanish), where God tells Abimelech in a dream that he is a dead man because the woman he has taken is be’ulat ba’al. The legal formula behind a capital statute turns out to have been used once before, in a warning that a foreign king took seriously enough to obey by dawn.

★★ The law splits one situation by geography and gets two opposite verdicts, and then explains itself — which is rare. A betrothed girl and a man in the city: both die, she because she did not cry out. The same pair in the field: only the man dies. The reasoning is stated outright in v26, and it is an analogy, not a rule: as when a man rises against his neighbour and murders him — a life — so is this matter. The law is not saying that rape resembles murder in its gravity. It is saying that it resembles murder in its evidentiary shape: an ambush in open country leaves the victim without witnesses, and the law resolves the silence in her favour by presuming that she screamed and no one heard. Verse 27 states the presumption as fact.

⚠ The presumption cuts the other way in the city, and the text does not soften it. The girl in the city is condemned over the matter that she did not cry out — a rule that treats the absence of an outcry as consent, and treats being within earshot of neighbours as proof that an outcry would have worked. Both premises have been argued against for as long as the verse has been read, including by readers who took it as binding law and had to build exceptions around it. This translation prints the clause as it stands.

⭐ The four words that end the section are a phrase the Bible normally reserves for nations. Ve-ein moshia lah, and there was no one to save her — the phrase stands in five verses, and this is the first of them in the order of the books. The others are a curse on Israel itself (Deuteronomy 28:29, not yet on these pages), the town of Jabesh-gilead under siege (1 Samuel 11:3), Babylon abandoned by her enchanters (Isaiah 47:15), and David’s enemies crying out unheard (Psalm 18:42; none yet on these pages). Every other occurrence is about armies, cities and empires. Here it is one girl in a field, and the Hebrew gives her the same sentence.

★ Verse 26 leaves a word dangling and one witness keeps it. The Hebrew reads u-retsacho nefesh — and murders him, a life — with the noun sitting after a verb that does not need it. The NWT 1984 prints ‘and indeed murders him, even a soul’; every other witness on both shelves drops it. ⚠ And the Douay imports a character the Hebrew does not have, reading ‘as a robber riseth against his brother’ where the Hebrew has only ish, a man — then ends the verse ‘so also did the damsel suffer’, which is a conclusion rather than a translation.

★★ This is the hardest decision in the chapter, and the Hebrew gives three data points rather than one. The case is a man and an unbetrothed virgin. The Torah legislates it twice. Exodus 22:16 (already on these pages) opens ve-khi yefatteh ish betulah — if a man entices a virgin — a verb of persuasion, the one behind Jeremiah’s you enticed me and I was enticed; and Exodus then lets the girl’s father refuse the marriage outright. This verse opens ve-tefasah, he seizes her, and gives the father no refusal at all. And three verses earlier, at v25, the field case uses a third verb: ve-hecheziq bah, he overpowered her.

⭐ The distinction between v25 and v28 is not invented by translators; it is the difference between two Hebrew verbs, and a narrative settles which is which. Chazaq in this construction is to prevail over by force — and it is the verb 2 Samuel 13:14 (not yet on these pages) uses of Amnon and Tamar, he was stronger than she, and he violated her and lay with her, in the one episode nobody disputes. Taphas is to grasp, to take hold of, to handle: it is what the parents do to the son they drag to the elders at 21:19 one chapter ago, what a soldier does to a captured city, and what a man does to a bow or a sickle. It is force, and it is not the stronger word available. Deuteronomy had chazaq in hand three verses earlier and did not use it again.

⚠ So the shelf now splits along a line that did not exist a century ago, and the split is a modern one. Every older witness renders taphas as a taking hold: the KJV and the ASV read ‘lay hold on her’; the Geneva reads ‘take her’; the Douay reads ‘taking her’; the RV 1909 and the RV60 both read «la tomare»; the NWT 1984 reads ‘seizes her’ and the TNM 1987 «la prenda». Then the modern half: the NIV prints ‘rapes her’, the TLB ‘rapes a girl’, and the NVI «la obliga a acostarse con él». ⭐ The tell is what those same versions do at v25: the NIV prints ‘rapes her’ there too. Where the Hebrew has two verbs of different strength, that shelf has one English word, and the gradient the law is built on disappears.

★ This translation prints seizes, and states plainly what that does and does not settle. It is stronger than Exodus’s entices and weaker than v25’s overpowers, which is exactly where the Hebrew word sits, and it leaves the reader with the question the text leaves open rather than answering it in the verse. ⚠ Two other features of the law belong in the reader’s hands with it. The penalty clause names the man’s act with innah, because he violated her — the same verb used of Shechem and Dinah at Genesis 34:2 and of the captive woman at 21:14, and the verb this chapter already used at v24 of the man who is put to death. So the sentence that fines him fifty of silver describes what he did in the same word the chapter uses of a capital offence. And the clause and they are found is plural, which is what makes v28 read to many as a discovery of two people rather than of one crime — while v25’s field case has no such clause and needs none.

⚠ What the law does is not in doubt, whatever the verb means. The man pays the father, marries the woman, and loses the right of divorce for life — the closing sentence the slanderer of v19 receives, at half the price and all but letter for letter: and she shall be his wife, he may not send her away all his days, the two differing by a single prefixed letter on the one verb. ⭐ Read against Exodus, two things have changed and neither is the crime. Exodus 22:17 gives the girl’s father an outright veto — if her father utterly refuses to give her to him — and Deuteronomy takes it away. And Exodus leaves the sum to custom, he shall weigh out silver according to the bride-price of virgins, where Deuteronomy names a figure. Whether that is a protection — a woman whom nobody else would now marry, guaranteed a household — or an obligation on the victim, is the question the last verse of the chapter leaves standing.