Deuteronomy
Chapter 25
1 If people have a dispute and go to court, the judges should decide the case, declare the innocent person right, and find the guilty person at fault.
2 If a bad person deserves punishment, the judge will make him lie down and be hit in front of him, as many times as his wrong act deserves.
3 He may be hit with up to forty lashes, but no more, so that your brother is not disgraced in your eyes.
4 Do not cover the ox’s mouth when it is working with the grain.
5 If two brothers live together and one dies without having children, his widow should not marry an outsider. Her husband’s brother should marry her, fulfilling the brother-in-law’s responsibility.
6 The first child she has will take his dead brother’s place so his name will not be forgotten in Israel.
7 If the man does not want to marry his brother’s widow, she should go to the town leaders at the gate and say, “My husband’s brother won’t continue his family name in Israel; he refuses his duty to me as my husband’s brother.”
8 The leaders of his town shall call him and talk to him; and if he insists and says, I don’t want to marry her;
9 The brother’s wife must come to him before the elders, take off his shoe, spit in his face, and say, “This is what happens to a man who won’t carry on his brother’s family.”
10 In Israel, people will call his family ‘The House of the Man Whose Shoe Was Taken Off.’
11 When men fight and one’s wife tries to save her husband from the one hitting him by reaching out and grabbing his private parts:
12 Then you must cut off her hand and show her no pity.
13 You must not have different weights, big and small, in your bag.
14 Do not keep different sized measures, large and small, in your house.
15 You must use accurate and fair weights and measures so that you may live a long time in the land God is giving you.
16 Everyone who does these things, and all who act unfairly, are hated by God.
17 Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt.
18 He attacked you on the journey, hitting all the weakest people at the back when you were tired and weak; he did not respect God.
19 So when God has given you peace from all your enemies around, in the land God gives you to own, you must erase all memory of Amalek from under the sky; do not forget this.