Deuteronomy 25

¹ ‘If men have any dispute they must go to court for the judges to decide between them; these must declare the one who is right to be in the right, the one who in the wrong to be in the wrong.

² If the one who is in the wrong deserves a flogging, the judge shall make him lie down and have him flogged in his presence

³ He may impose forty strokes but no more, lest the flogging be too severe and your brother be degraded in your eyes.

⁴ ‘You must not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the corn.

⁵ ‘If brothers live together and one of them dies childless, the dead man’s wife must not marry a stranger outside the family. Her husband’s brother must come to her and, exercising his levirate, make her his wife,

⁶ and the first son she bears shall assume the dead brother’s name; and so his name will not be blotted out in Israel.

⁷ But if the man declines to take his brother’s wife, she must go to the elders at the gate and say, “I have no levir willing to perpetuate the name of his brother in Israel; he declines to exercise his levirate in my favour”.

⁸ The elders of the town shall summon the man and talk to him. If he appears before them, and shall say, “I refuse to take her”,

⁹ then she to whom he owes levirate shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take the sandal off his foot, spit in his face, and pronounce the following words, “This is what we do to the man who does not restore his brother’s house”,

¹⁰ and the man shall be surnamed in Israel, House-of-the-Unshod.

¹¹ When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband from the other’s blows by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts,

¹² you shall cut her hand off and show no pity.

¹³ ‘You are not to keep two different weights in your bag, one heavy, one light.

¹⁴ You are not to keep two different measures in your house, one large, one small.

¹⁵ You must keep one weight, full and accurate, so that you may have a long life is in the land that Yahweh your God is giving you.

¹⁶ For anyone who does things of this kind and acts dishonestly is detestable to Yahweh your God.

¹⁷ ‘Remember how Amalek treated you when you were on your way out of Egypt.

¹⁸ He met you on your way and, after you had gone by, he fell on you from the rear and cut off the stragglers; when you were faint and weary he had no fear of God.

¹⁹ When Yahweh your God has granted you peace from all the enemies surrounding you in the land Yahweh your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you are to blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.