★★ This sentence belongs to the sexual case law of chapter 22 by subject and to this chapter by numbering, and this translation follows the numbering. Every English Bible on the shelf prints it as 22:30; the Masoretic text counts it as 23:1, which is why this chapter has twenty-six verses here and twenty-five everywhere else. The Masoretes then close it with a {S}, so in the scribal tradition it is a paragraph of its own, joined to neither the case law before it nor the assembly law after it. The chapter opens, in other words, on a verse that no tradition quite knows where to file.

⭐ The second half explains the first, and it does so with a word this book used one page ago of the corners of a cloak. Kanaf is a wing, and then the loose edge of a garment — the four kanfot of 22:12 that must carry twisted cords. To spread your kanaf over a woman is to take her in marriage (Ruth 3:9, not yet on these pages), so a father’s kanaf is a father’s marriage, and to uncover it is to undo the claim the spreading made. The phrase kenaf aviv stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, this one and the curse of Deuteronomy 27:20 (now on these pages), where the whole people answers Amen to it. Leviticus 18:8 and 20:11 (both already on these pages) give the same law in Leviticus’s own idiom — your father’s nakedness — and Leviticus adds the death sentence Deuteronomy leaves out.

⚠ The shelf keeps the garment in its older witnesses and translates it away in the newer ones, and the seam runs through each version’s own revision. The KJV reads ‘nor discover his father’s skirt’, where discover still means uncover; the ASV and the Geneva keep ‘skirt’, and the NWT 1984 reads ‘that he may not uncover the skirt of his father’. Then the modern half decides what the skirt means and prints the meaning: the NIV ‘he must not dishonor his father’s bed’, the NWT 2013 ‘so that he may not dishonor his father’, the RV60 «ni profanará el lecho de su padre» where the RV 1909 had «ni descubrirá el regazo de su padre», and the TNM 2019 «para no deshonrar a su padre» where the 1987 had kept «la falda». ⚠ The TLB goes furthest and adds a fact: ‘his father’s widow’. The Hebrew says wife, and does not say the father is dead.

★★ Six times in four verses this chapter says qehal Jehovah, the assembly of Jehovah, and the phrase is rarer than its repetition here makes it sound. It stands in eight verses of the Hebrew Bible, and four of them are this chapter — v2, v3, v4 and v9. Of the other four, two are already on these pages and both are Korah’s generation: the rebels ask Moses why he lifts himself up above the assembly of Jehovah at Numbers 16:3, and the people ask why he has brought the assembly of Jehovah into the wilderness to die at Numbers 20:4. The phrase names Israel as a body summoned before God, and this chapter is where the Torah draws a line around it and says who may not cross. The congregation, the community as a standing fact, is a different word and is not what is being fenced.

★ Verse 2 names neither organ; the Hebrew is two euphemisms and one of them is a word found nowhere else. Petsua dakka, wounded by crushing, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, and kerut shofkhah — cut off in the outflow, from shafakh, to pour — is a noun that stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible too. The pair is read, and has always been read, as the two ways a man was made a eunuch; Leviticus 21:20 (already on these pages) bars a priest with crushed testicles from the altar in a different word, and Leviticus 22:24 forbids offering an animal bruised, crushed, torn or cut, whose fourth word is this verse’s kerut. This translation keeps the first euphemism as the Hebrew has it and gives the second a plain English noun, because a reader who meets the outflow cold has nothing to hold on to. ⚠ The ban was not the last word the Hebrew Bible spoke on the subject. Isaiah 56:3–5 (not yet on these pages) answers it almost clause for clause — let not the eunuch say, Look, I am a dry tree — and promises the saris who keeps the covenant a yad and a name in God’s own house, better than sons and daughters. And the eunuch of Acts 8, a man this verse excludes, is baptised on the spot.

⭐ Mamzer is printed here as a Hebrew word because its meaning is disputed, and one version on the shelf has been saying so since 1609. Read out from a consonantal search that also matches mimmizrach, from the east, the noun stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible: this one, and Zechariah 9:6 (not yet on these pages), where a mamzer will sit in Ashdod after the pride of the Philistines is cut off — a verse that tells us nothing about parentage and something about foreignness. The traditional Jewish definition, which this note reports rather than adopts, is narrow and technical: the child of a union the law itself punishes with death or cutting-off, so incest or adultery, and not a child born outside marriage. The Greek Old Testament rendered it ek pornēs, born of a prostitute, and the Latin kept the Hebrew word and glossed it with the Greek — which is why the Douay prints ‘A mamzer, that is to say, one born of a prostitute’, the only witness on either shelf to show the reader that there is a word under the translation. Everyone else chooses. The KJV, ASV, Geneva and TLB print ‘bastard’, and the RV 1909 and RV60 «bastardo»; the NWT 1984 reads ‘illegitimate son’; and, closest to the rabbinic sense, the NIV reads ‘born of a forbidden marriage’ and the NVI «nacido de una unión ilegítima».

⚠ And the shelf splits on the assembly itself, along a line this project has already drawn. Qahal is the word the Greek Bible renders ekklēsia, and the Latin followed the Greek — so the Douay prints ‘shall not enter into the church of the Lord’ — four times, where the Hebrew phrase comes six, because its Latin condenses v3 and v4 to one clause each — of a body of Israelites standing on the plains of Moab. The KJV and Geneva print ‘congregation’ here, the very word the 1611 translators were forbidden to use for ekklēsia in the New Testament; the ASV and NIV print ‘assembly’, the NWT 1984 ‘congregation’, and the TLB replaces the people with a building, ‘the sanctuary’. One Hebrew phrase, four English institutions.

★★ Two nations are shut out for ever, and the law gives two reasons, and the second is a story already on these pages told in a different vocabulary. Numbers 22–24 has Balak of Moab send for Balaam, and the thing he sends for is named there with two verbs, arar and qabab, which those chapters keep carefully apart. Deuteronomy retells it with a third. Balaam was hired leqallelekha, and God turned ha-qelalah into a blessing: the root is qalal, and the Balaam story in Numbers never uses it once. It is not a lesser word. It is the word this book will use for the covenant curse itself, set before Israel beside the blessing at 11:26 (already on these pages) and pronounced from Mount Ebal in chapter 27 (not yet on these pages). What Balak bought, in Deuteronomy’s telling, was the curse Israel would later have to choose against — and God reversed it before anyone had chosen anything. ⚠ The exclusion is ad olam, for ever, and the tenth generation of v4 is that word said as a number; the Douay reads it from the far side, ‘even after the tenth generation shall not enter’, a threshold that is never reached rather than a count that is never finished. The words the curse into a blessing stand in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, this one and Nehemiah 13:2 (not yet on these pages), which quotes this law nearly whole to a post-exilic assembly that then acts on it.

★ The first reason is a hospitality that was withheld, and the Torah’s own account of the journey does not make it simple. The phrase with bread and with water stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, here and in Nehemiah’s quotation. Qiddem is to come out ahead of someone, to meet them on the road — a host’s verb, and the charge is that nobody came. But Deuteronomy 2:28–29 (already on these pages) has Moses tell Sihon that the sons of Esau who live in Seir, and the Moabites who live in Ar did sell Israel food and water for silver, and 2:9 and 2:19 forbid Israel to harass either Moab or Ammon, because their land is a possession God gave to Lot’s sons. Readings differ on how the two chapters fit. The narrowest reading is that a sale is not a welcome — the verb here is about coming out to meet, not about refusing to trade — and it is the reading the verb supports; but the text does not reconcile them, and this translation does not do it for the text. What both chapters agree on is the kinship: these are Israel’s cousins from Genesis 19:37–38, whose land is protected and whose people are excluded, in the same book.

⭐ Verse 5 changes number in the middle of the sentence, and the grammar is telling two stories at once. They did not meet you plural — etkhem, the whole nation on the road — and then he hired Balaam against you singular, alekha, and to curse you singular. The verb is singular too: sakhar, he hired, though the sentence has just been about two peoples. The subject is Balak, or Moab as a single actor, and the shelf divides on whether to keep it: the KJV, ASV and NWT 1984 all print ‘they hired’, smoothing the singular to match the nations; the RV 1909 keeps it, «alquiló contra ti», and its own revision the RV60 drops it for «alquilaron». This translation prints he, and the phrase that opens the verse is one 22:24 used twice of a stoning: al devar asher, over the matter that, stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible — the sentence on the girl and the man in the city, this sentence on two nations, and 2 Samuel 13:22 (not yet on these pages), where it gives Absalom’s reason for hating Amnon: over the matter that he violated Tamar his sister. It is the formula for stating the grounds of a verdict, and it turns out to be the same one whether the accused is a person or a people.

★ Jehovah was not willing is a phrase this book has used once already, and it will use it once more, and the three uses answer each other. Avah Jehovah, with lo before it, stands in six verses of the Hebrew Bible, three of them Deuteronomy. At 10:10 (already on these pages) Jehovah was not willing to ruin you, after the calf; here he was not willing to listen to Balaam; and at 29:19 (not yet on these pages) he will not be willing to pardon the man who blesses himself in his own stubbornness. The same unwillingness saves Israel twice and condemns an Israelite once. The verb also stood at 13:9, turned on the reader — you shall not consent to him — of a brother who whispers about other gods.

⚠ Verse 7’s ban on seeking their peace has an afterlife, and one chapter already on these pages says the exact opposite to a different city. Shelomam, their peace, stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible: here, and Ezra 9:12 (not yet on these pages), which widens this sentence from two nations to every people of the land as the ground for refusing intermarriage. Set beside it Jeremiah 29:7 (already on these pages): seek the shalom of the city to which I have exiled you — the same verb, darash, the same noun, and Babylon. Israel is told never to seek Moab’s peace and told to pray for Babylon’s. The verb returns in this chapter at v22, with God as its subject. ⚠ Eleven of the thirteen witnesses print some form of seeking their peace and their good; the exceptions are worth reading. The NIV reads ‘Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them’, which turns shalom into a document — a reading with a Latin precedent, since the Douay opens the verse ‘Thou shalt not make peace with them’ before returning to the Hebrew’s ‘seek their prosperity’ — and the TLB reads ‘You must never, as long as you live, try to help the Ammonites or the Moabites in any way’ — which names the nations the Hebrew leaves as a pronoun and turns a ban on seeking their welfare into a ban on any assistance. ⭐ And the ban is not the Bible’s last word on Moab any more than v2 was its last word on the eunuch. Ruth is a Moabite (already on these pages), and the genealogy of David runs through her; the later Jewish reading that the law bars the Ammonite and not the Ammonitess is reported here as a reading, not asserted as the text’s meaning. What is checkable is that Lamentations 1:10 (already on these pages) quotes this verse of nations walking into the sanctuary about whom you commanded that they should not come into your assembly — a poet watching the tenth generation and every generation after it come in at once.

★★ The verb for what you must not feel toward an Edomite is the verb this book used for what you must feel toward an idol. Lo teta’ev is the intensive form of the root behind to’evah, abomination, and Deuteronomy 7:26 (already on these pages) commanded it with a doubled emphasis: you shall utterly abominate it, of the silver and gold on a carved god. In the Torah the verb stands in two verses, that one and this, and the second cancels the first for two named peoples. The Edomite because he is your brother — Esau’s line, the brothers of 2:4 and 2:8, whom Israel passed by without a fight even after Edom refused them the road at Numbers 20:18–21. The Egyptian because you were a stranger in his land — and the reason is the one the Torah gives four times over for protecting the ger in Israel: Exodus 22:21, 23:9, Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy 10:19, all already on these pages, all for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Here the memory that protects the stranger among you is turned around to protect the people whose land it was. Egypt enslaved Israel; the law remembers that it also housed them, and files the housing.

★ Third generation against tenth, and the arithmetic is Deuteronomy’s own. Dor shelishi, a third generation, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, and dor asiri, a tenth, in two — v3 and v4, both this chapter. Ten generations is for ever said as a number; three is a grandchild. A Moabite’s descendants are never in; an Egyptian’s grandchildren are. ⚠ The TLB supplies a group the Hebrew does not name: ‘The grandchildren of the Egyptians who came with you from Egypt may enter’. The verse says children who are born to them and nothing about who left Egypt with whom.

⚠ The Spanish shelf carries a name the English one does not. The RV 1909 reads «No abominarás al Idumeo», using the Greek and Latin form of the nation’s name, Idumaea, and its revision the RV60 corrects it to «edomita». On the English side the older witnesses keep abhor (KJV, ASV, Geneva, Douay) and the NWT 1984 ‘detest’, which is the register the Hebrew has; the NIV prints ‘despise’ and the NWT 2013 ‘hate’, both a shade lighter than a word that belongs to idols. And the NIV gives up the kinship word altogether: ‘the Edomites are related to you’. The Hebrew says brother, and this book has said it of Esau’s sons before.

★★ The chapter’s reason for a latrine is the sentence Genesis used for Eden. Jehovah your God mithallekh, walks about, in the midst of your camp. The participle stands in eight verses of the Hebrew Bible, and God is its subject in three of them: Genesis 3:8 (already on these pages), where the man and his wife hear the sound of Jehovah God walking about in the garden and hide; this verse, where he walks about in a military camp; and 2 Samuel 7:6 (not yet on these pages), where he says he has never lived in a house but has been walking about in a tent and in a tabernacle. Leviticus 26:12 (already on these pages) makes the same verb a promise, I will walk about among you. The presence that made two people hide their nakedness in a garden is the presence a soldier is told to keep his camp fit for, and the word for what God must not see is the one Genesis reached for: ervat davar, literally the nakedness of a thing. That phrase stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible. The other is Deuteronomy 24:1 (now on these pages), the next chapter, where it is the ground on which a man may write his wife a bill of divorce — and the argument over what it means there has lasted two thousand years. Here it is what must not be visible in a camp.

★ The law opens with the words that opened the two war laws before it. Ki tetse, when you go out, in the singular, opens three laws of this book — 20:1 and 21:10, both when you go out to battle, and this one, when you go out as a camp. The noun machaneh then comes seven times in six verses, and what the law asks of it is tahor, the clean-and-unclean of Leviticus, applied to a place where there is no sanctuary. Leviticus 15:16 (already on these pages) gives the private version of v11: an emission of semen, bathing, unclean until evening. Deuteronomy adds what a camp adds — the man goes out and stays out until the sun goes in — and Numbers 5:3 had already said why the camp matters: outside the camp you shall put them, so that they do not defile their camps, in the midst of which I dwell. The Hebrew of v12 makes a small joke the English cannot quite keep: u-khevo ha-shemesh yavo, when the sun comes in he comes in, one verb for both. Miqreh, the thing that happens, is the dictionary’s word for chance; 1 Samuel 20:26 (not yet on these pages) shows Saul reaching for the same rule to explain David’s empty seat — something has happened to him, he is not clean.

⭐ Two words in v13–14 need saying plainly, because the versions have been polite about them for four hundred years. Yad at v13 is a hand, and here it is a place — a side, a spot set apart — and it is the same rare sense in which Isaiah 56:5 promises the eunuch of v2 a yad and a name in God’s house. The KJV and ASV print ‘a place’ and leave the reader to work out what for; the NWT 1984 reads ‘a private place’, the Douay ‘a place… to which thou mayst go for the necessities of nature’, the NIV ‘a place… where you can go to relieve yourself’ and the TLB, alone, ‘The toilet area’. And tse’atekha at v14 is excrement, built on the same root, yatsa, to go out, that this chapter uses of leaving Egypt at v5, of going out to war at v10, of the unclean man leaving the camp at v11, of going out to the place at v13, and of what goes out of your lips at v24 — six words on one root in one chapter. This translation prints what has come out of you to keep the root visible; the KJV’s ‘that which cometh from thee’ does the same, and the NWT 1984, NIV and TLB all print ‘excrement’, which is what it is.

★ The digging tool is the tabernacle’s tent-peg, and the thing it hangs from is a word with no second occurrence to check it against. Yated stands in nineteen verses of the Hebrew Bible, and the seven that come before this one in the Torah are all the pegs of the tabernacle and its court — Exodus 27:19, 35:18, 38:20, 38:31, 39:40, Numbers 3:37 and 4:32, all already on these pages, and all bronze. The eighth is a soldier’s trowel. After this the word goes to Jael, who drives one through Sisera’s temple (Judges 4:21, not yet on these pages), and to Isaiah 22:23, where a man is fastened as a peg in a sure place. It hangs al azenekha — and azen stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, spelled with the consonants of your ear but pointed as another word entirely, and the guesses have been going since the Greek, which read zone, a belt — so the Douay prints ‘a paddle at thy girdle’; the KJV prints ‘weapon’, the ASV and Geneva ‘weapons’, the NWT 1984 ‘implements’ and the NIV ‘equipment’. This translation prints gear, the word it used for keli at 22:5, because it covers weapons and tools alike and refuses to decide what the Hebrew does not.

⚠ One letter in v15 is a textual seam, shown here rather than sanded. The Masoretic text reads ve-hayah machaneikha qadosh with a yod that makes your camps plural, while the verb and the adjective around it are singular; the Samaritan Pentateuch is reported to read the singular. This translation prints your camp, as the grammar requires, and records that the consonants say more than one. ⚠ The RV 1909 calls the camp «el real», an old Spanish word for a royal encampment, which the RV60 replaces with «campamento»: a register seam, not a meaning one. And the TLB merges three pairs of verses in this section — 9 with 10, 15 with 16 and 17 with 18 in its numbering — so a reader of that version cannot find where one law ends.

★★ The formula that organises this whole book is given, once, to a runaway slave. Ba-maqom asher yivchar, in the place that he chooses, stands in eleven verses of the Hebrew Bible, every one of them Deuteronomy, and in ten of them the one who chooses is Jehovah: 12:14, 12:18, 14:23, 15:20, 16:2, 16:7, 16:11, 16:15, 16:16 and 31:11, all but the last already on these pages — the place he chooses for his name, to which every sacrifice, tithe and festival must be brought. The eleventh is v17, and the one who chooses is an escaped slave. He picks his town; the verb Deuteronomy reserves for God picking the place of his name is the verb it hands him. The phrase that follows, in one of your gates, stands in four verses of the Hebrew Bible, all this book, and the company it keeps is worth noticing: the needy brother at 15:7, the place the Passover may not be killed at 16:5, the apostate found at 17:2, and the fugitive here.

★ You shall not wrong him is the stranger’s sentence, and this is the first time it is said of a slave. In the Torah the verb yanah, to wrong or oppress, stands in five verses: Exodus 22:21 and Leviticus 19:33, both of the ger and both already on these pages; Leviticus 25:14 and 25:17, of a fellow Israelite in a sale; and this verse, of a slave who has fled his master. He is not sent back, and he is put under a protection the law had until now written only for the resident foreigner and for a fellow Israelite across a sale. ⭐ And the phrase where it is good for him has a twin. Ba-tov lo stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, and the other is 15:16 (already on these pages): the slave who refuses his freedom and stays, because he loves you and your household, because it is good for him with you. Two slaves in one book decide where it is good for them to be, and the law lets both decisions stand.

⭐ The verb for what you must not do to him is the verb the prophets use for the same act between nations. Tasgir is to shut someone up in another’s hand, to deliver up, and the Hebrew Bible uses it of exactly this scene more than once. Obadiah 1:14 (already on these pages) condemns Edom, the brother of v8, for standing at the crossroads to hand over his survivors on the day of distress; Amos 1:6 and 1:9 (already on these pages) condemn Gaza and Tyre for handing whole populations over to Edom. Joshua 20:5 (not yet on these pages) uses it of the cities of refuge, which shall not deliver up the manslayer to the avenger — so the fugitive slave is given the manslayer’s protection as well as the stranger’s. And in 1 Samuel 30:15 (not yet on these pages) an Egyptian slave abandoned by his Amalekite master makes David swear the very words: that you will not hand me over into the hand of my master. ⚠ The law of the surrounding world ran the other way, and this note reports rather than verifies it: the Code of Hammurabi, as the standard editions give it, makes harbouring a runaway slave a capital offence and pays a reward for returning one. Deuteronomy forbids the return and says nothing about a reward. ⚠ The KJV, ASV and Geneva print ‘servant’ for eved, which in modern English no longer says what the law is about; the NWT 1984, NIV and TLB print ‘slave’, as this translation does. The NIV also makes him plural, ‘do not hand them over to their master’, which is a decision about English pronouns and not about the Hebrew, where he is one man.

★★ Both nouns in v18 are built on qadosh, holy, and that is the whole difficulty. A qedeshah is, letter for letter, a consecrated woman, and a qadesh a consecrated man; the words say nothing about what either did, and the assumption that both were cult prostitutes attached to a shrine rests on how the words are used and on evidence outside the Bible that is thinner than most commentaries admit. Read out from the consonants, which also spell a place-name and a verb, the feminine stands in four verses of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 38:21 and 38:22 (already on these pages), where Hirah asks the men of Enaim for the qedeshah by the road and the narrator has just called the same woman a zonah; this verse; and Hosea 4:14 (not yet on these pages), where men sacrifice with the qedeshot. The masculine stands in six verses, this one, four in the histories and one in Job; in the histories it is first something that was in the land under Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:24) and then something three reforming kings cleared out — Asa, Jehoshaphat, Josiah (1 Kings 15:12, 22:47; 2 Kings 23:7; none yet on these pages), and 1 Kings 22:47 clears it with bi’er, the verb this book uses to burn out evil. This translation prints consecrated woman and consecrated man, as it did in Genesis 38, and lets the note say what the institution may have been.

⚠⚠ The KJV rendered qadesh ‘sodomite’, and the word has done harm the Hebrew never authorised. The rendering imports Genesis 19 into a verse that does not mention it, and with it the assumption that the consecrated man’s partners were men, which the Hebrew word neither says nor denies; a qadesh is defined by the shrine he served, not by whom he served it with. That one English word has been read for four centuries as the Bible naming, and condemning, men who have sex with men, in a verse about a Canaanite religious office. The ASV kept ‘sodomite’; the Geneva had ‘whore keeper’ and the Douay ‘whoremonger’, both about prostitution and neither about Sodom; the RV 1909 printed «sodomítico» and the RV60 kept it as «sodomita» into 1960. The modern half commits instead to the cultic reading: the NIV prints ‘shrine prostitute’, the NWT 1984 ‘temple prostitute’ and the NVI «prostitución ritual» — which is probably right and is still a decision the word itself does not make. Only the TLB flattens both nouns, to ‘prostitutes… either men or women’, and then, at v19, does something none of the others do.

⭐ The price of a dog has been read three ways for two thousand years, and the shelf is now split between them. The phrase stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible. The plain reading is a dog — the animal, sold, with the money vowed to the sanctuary — and the rabbinic law of exchanges reads it that way, as this note reports without adopting. The second reading, older than any English Bible, takes dog as a slur for the qadesh of the verse before, so that the two halves of v19 answer the two halves of v18: the woman’s wage, the man’s price. A third, modern, makes it a male prostitute of any kind. The KJV, Geneva, Douay and NWT 1984 all print ‘the price of a dog’, the ASV ‘the wages of a dog’, the RV 1909 «precio de perro» and the RV60 «el precio de un perro» — every one of them an animal. Then the seam: the NWT 2013 prints ‘the price paid to a male prostitute’ where its own 1984 text had the dog, the TNM 2019 «el dinero pagado a un prostituto» where the 1987 had «el precio de un perro», and the NIV reads ‘the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute’ and the NVI «prostitución ritual, tanto femenina como masculina», with no animal left in the verse. ⚠ The TLB prints ‘the earnings of a prostitute or a homosexual’ — a modern category set into a verse that has an animal, or at most a shrine-servant, and no word for sexual orientation in it at all. Revelation 22:15 (already on these pages) keeps the dogs outside the city with the sorcerers and the sexually immoral; Matthew 7:6 tells you not to give what is holy to them. The animal is unclean company throughout the Bible, which is why a reader can never be quite sure whether v19 has changed the subject.

★ The wage has a technical name, and the closing formula has a twin in Proverbs. Etnan is a prostitute’s fee and nothing else; read out from a hit that is also a man’s name, the noun stands in six verses of the Hebrew Bible, this one and five in the prophets, where it is always Israel’s idolatry described as whoring — Micah 1:7 (already on these pages) burns Samaria’s etnan in the fire. And to’avat Jehovah elohekha gam sheneihem, an abomination to Jehovah your God, both of them alike, is the sixth of the eight times this book calls something an abomination to Jehovah, a tally 22:5’s note set out; the both of them is a shape Proverbs likes, closing 17:15 and 20:10 (neither yet on these pages) with the same words on false acquittals and false weights.

★★ The Hebrew for interest is the Hebrew for a snakebite, and this is the one passage that uses it as a verb. Neshekh is what the burning serpents did at Numbers 21:6 (already on these pages), and they bit the people, and what Dan will be at Genesis 49:17, a serpent that bites the horse’s heels. As a noun the word stands in ten verses of the Hebrew Bible, every one of them about lending, and the law has paired it before: Exodus 22:25 and Leviticus 25:36–37, both already on these pages, both of the poor brother. What is new here is the verb. Tashikh is the causative — to make someone be bitten — and it is found only in these two verses, three times; with the noun three times and the passive yishakh once, the root comes seven times in two verses. The NWT 1984 is the witness that keeps the causative in English, ‘You must not make your brother pay interest’, and this translation follows it; the KJV, Geneva and Douay print ‘usury’, which in 1611 meant any interest at all and now means too much of it, and the ASV and NIV print ‘interest’. Habakkuk 2:7 (not yet on these pages) makes the pun outright: your biters will rise, meaning your creditors.

⚠⚠ Verse 21 draws a line between brother and foreigner, and the line has a history that must be named. The nokhri is the same outsider 15:3 lets you press for a debt and 17:15 keeps off the throne: a man outside the household of obligation, who may be charged what a brother may not. In medieval Christian Europe this verse was read from the other side. Canon law forbade Christians to lend at interest to one another, taking brother to mean fellow Christian; Jews, outside that brotherhood and shut out of most guilds and land, were permitted and often compelled into moneylending — and the verse that made the lender’s trade lawful was then used to make him hateful, so that the figure of the Jewish usurer was built partly out of a Deuteronomic exemption that Christian rulers had themselves enforced. That is a documented use of this text, and it is a misreading: the verse addresses Israel about its own poor and its own passing strangers, defines neither party by faith, and says nothing about a lender being despised for lending. ★ Read in its own book, the purpose clause is the point: so that Jehovah your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to — the phrase 12:7, 12:18 and 15:10 use of rejoicing and of giving. Not charging your brother is filed with the festival and the open hand, as a thing God pays back.

⚠ Two versions rewrite the sentence and both move it the same way. The Douay reads ‘To thy brother thou shalt lend that which he wanteth, without usury’, following a Latin that adds a duty to lend where the Hebrew has only a ban on interest. The TLB turns the blessing into a threat: ‘if you take interest from a brother, an Israeli, the Lord your God won’t bless you’ — the negative of a clause the Hebrew states positively, with a modern nationality added. And the RV 1909 prints «logro», an old word for gain-on-a-loan, four times in two verses, where the RV60 has «interés»: the same register seam as usury and interest on the English side, a century apart.

★★ The Torah legislates vows three times and asks a different question each time; this is the one about speed. Numbers 30 (already on these pages) asks who may cancel a vow; Leviticus 27 asks what one costs to redeem; this passage asks how long you have. Lo te’acher le-shallemo, you shall not delay to pay it — and the phrase stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, this one and Ecclesiastes 5:3 (not yet on these pages), which quotes it with one word changed and then draws this chapter’s own next sentence as a proverb: better that you not vow than that you vow and not pay. Verse 23 is the Torah’s own version of that: if you refrain from vowing, there will be no sin in you. A vow is not asked for. It is only enforced. And the verb for refraining is chadal, the one Exodus 23:5 used for the forbearance Deuteronomy 22 replaced with hide yourself; here it is the good option.

★ Darash returns from v7 with God as its subject, and it is the third time in two chapters. At 22:2 the brother comes seeking his lost ox; at v7 you shall not seek Moab’s peace; here Jehovah will certainly seek it — darosh yidreshennu, doubled, the vow treated as a debt he collects in person. The KJV, ASV and NIV print ‘require’ or ‘demand’, which is the sense, and it is what this translation printed at 18:19, where God says of the man who will not hear his prophet I myself will require it of him; here it keeps seek, so that the three uses in these two chapters read as one verb, and records that 18:19 is the same root. And it will be sin in you, ve-hayah vekha chet, stands in three verses of the Hebrew Bible, all Deuteronomy: 15:9 (already on these pages), of the man who refuses his poor brother a loan because the release year is near; this verse, of the man who is slow to pay God; and 24:15 (not yet on these pages), the next chapter, of the man who holds a labourer’s wage overnight. Three ways of keeping money a little longer than you should, one verdict.

⭐ What goes out of your lips is the language of Numbers 30, and it is one of this chapter’s six words on yatsa. Motsa sefatayim, with its various suffixes, stands in four verses of the Hebrew Bible: Numbers 30:13 (already on these pages), of a wife’s vows that her husband annuls, everything that came out of her lips; this verse; Psalm 89:35, where God says of his own covenant what has gone out of my lips I will not alter; and Jeremiah 17:16 (neither yet on these pages). Nedavah, a freewill offering, is the noun that makes the argument: the thing you were free not to promise is the thing you are now bound to give. ⚠ The TLB prints v23 in brackets with an exclamation mark, ‘(But it is not a sin if you refrain from vowing!)’, as if it were an aside; in the Hebrew it is the hinge of the paragraph. The NIV rebuilds v24 around a reason, ‘because you made your vow freely’, where the Hebrew simply says a freewill offering in apposition. And Matthew 5:33–37 (already on these pages) is the New Testament reading this passage forward: you have heard that it was said, you shall pay back your oaths to the Lord; but I say to you, do not swear at all. Deuteronomy already said the second half.

★★ The last law in the chapter is the one the dictionary was waiting for. Chermesh, a sickle, stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, both in this book: 16:9 (already on these pages) starts the count to the Feast of Weeks from its first swing, and this verse forbids swinging it at all in a field that is not yours. The tool is what separates a hungry traveller from a harvester — a hand may take what a hand can hold, and a blade may take nothing. The verb for the swing is taniph, the root of the wave offering; and melilot, the plucked ears, stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, a word for grain in the hand and nowhere else. Leviticus 19:9–10 and 23:22 (already on these pages) told the owner what to leave at the edge of his field for the poor and the stranger; this law tells the passer-by what he may take from the middle of it, and Deuteronomy 24:19–21 (now on these pages) will finish the set with the forgotten sheaf, the olive and the vineyard.

⭐ Two men who are not a brother. Most of the people in this chapter’s laws are named by their standing toward you — your brother three times at v8, v20 and v21, the stranger, the foreigner, the slave, the four nations. The vineyard and the field belong to re’akha, your neighbour, three times in two verses: not kin, just the man whose land you are walking through. And what you may eat is ke-nafshekha sov’ekha, as your soul desires, to your fill — the same nefesh this book uses at 12:15 and 12:20 of the meat you may eat in your own gates, and ke-nafshekha itself stands in two verses of the Hebrew Bible, the other being 13:7’s your friend who is as your own soul. The measure of what you may take from a stranger’s vineyard is your appetite, and the limit is your keli, the vessel that would carry it home.

★ This is the law the disciples were keeping when the Pharisees objected, and the objection was not to the plucking. Matthew 12:1–2 and Mark 2:23–24 (both already on these pages) have Jesus’s disciples going through grainfields and plucking heads of grain, and the Pharisees say what is not lawful to do on the sabbath. The eating from a field that was not theirs is never raised, because this verse permits it; the whole argument is about the day. A reader who has this law can hear what the objection was not. ⚠ The Latin adds a detail the Hebrew lacks and Luke has: the Douay reads ‘thou mayst break the ears, and rub them in thy hand’, and rubbing is Luke 6:1’s word (not yet on these pages), not Deuteronomy’s. ⚠ The KJV and Geneva print ‘corn’, which in their English meant any grain; the NVI prints «trigal», a wheat field, where the Hebrew qamah is standing grain of any kind; and the RV60 and NIV print a ‘basket’ at v25 for a word that is any vessel at all. The NWT 1984 is the witness that keeps satisfy your soul, its habit with nefesh, and the one that prints the hand plucking ‘only the ripe ears’ — an only and a ripe the Hebrew does not have.