A WITNESS — and in this legal vocabulary a person, not a testimony: the one who saw. Deuteronomy 17:6 sets the threshold that a capital sentence needs two or three of them and that one is not enough, stated twice in one verse, positively and then negatively. ⭐ The formula recurs at Deuteronomy 19:15, which lifts it out of capital cases and applies it to every charge — and it is 19:15's wording, not this one's, that Matthew 18:16 quotes. ⚠ Distinct from edut, the testimony or covenant-document itself. The root also makes the verb for testifying against someone, and the false witness of the ninth commandment. ⭐ What 17:7 then does with the witness has no parallel: his hand must be first on the condemned, before the crowd's — which removes the anonymity that makes false testimony cheap. ⚠ Correction, made when 19:15 was translated: the two verses are not the same formula. 17:6 writes shnayim edim and 19:15 writes shnei edim, and each of those stands in exactly one verse of the Hebrew Bible — those two. Only o shloshah edim is shared, standing in two verses, the same two. What recurs is the rule, not the wording. → first discussed at Deut 17:6