8If a case is too baffling for you to decide, be it a controversy over homicide, civil law, or assault—matters of dispute in your courts—you shall promptly repair to the place that the LORD your God will have chosen, 9and appear before the levitical priests, or the magistrate in charge at the time, and present your problem. When they have announced to you the verdict in the case, 10you shall carry out the verdict that is announced to you from that place that the LORD chose, observing scrupulously all their instructions to you. 11You shall act in accordance with the instructions given you and the ruling handed down to you; you must not deviate from the verdict that they announce to you either to the right or to the left. 12Should a man act presumptuously and disregard the priest charged with serving there the LORD your God, or the magistrate, that man shall die. Thus you will sweep out evil from Israel: 13all the people will hear and be afraid and will not act presumptuously again.
14If, after you have entered the land that the LORD your God has assigned to you, and taken possession of it and settled in it, you decide, “I will set a king over me, as do all the nations about me,” 15you shall be free to set a king over yourself, one chosen by the LORD your God. Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your own people; you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kinsman. 16Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses, since the LORD has warned you, “You must not go back that way again.” 17And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess.
18When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll byb the levitical priests. 19Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the LORD his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws. 20Thus he will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long in the midst of Israel.
18 The levitical priests, the whole tribe of Levi, shall have no territorial portion with Israel. They shall live only off the LORD’s offerings by fire as theira portion, 2and shall have no portion among their brother tribes: the LORD is their portion, as He promised them.
3This then shall be the priests’ due from the people: Everyone who offers a sacrifice, whether an ox or a sheep, must give the shoulder, the cheeks, and the stomach to the priest. 4You shall also give him the first fruits of your new grain and wine and oil, and the first shearing of your sheep. 5For the LORD your God has chosen him and his descendants, out of all your tribes, to be in attendance for service in the name of the LORD for all time.
6If a Levite would go, from any of the settlements throughout Israel where he has been residing, to the place that the LORD has chosen, he may do so whenever he pleases. 7He may serve in the name of the LORD his God like all his fellow Levites who are there in attendance before the LORD. 8They shall receive equal shares of the dues, b-without regard to personal gifts or patrimonies.-b
9When you enter the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations. 10Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, 11one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. 12For anyone who does such things is abhorrent to the LORD, and it is because of these abhorrent things that the LORD your God is dispossessing them before you. 13You must be wholehearted with the LORD your God. 14Those nations that you are about to dispossess do indeed resort to soothsayers and augurs; to you, however, the LORD your God has not assigned the like.
15The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your own people, like myself; him you shall heed. 16This is just what you asked of the LORD your God at Horeb, on the day of the Assembly, saying, “Let me not hear the voice of the LORD my God any longer or see this wondrous fire any more, lest I die.” 17Whereupon the LORD said to me, “They have done well in speaking thus. 18I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own people, like yourself: I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him; 19and if anybody fails to heed the words he speaks in My name, I myself will call him to account. 20But any prophet who presumes to speak in My name an oracle that I did not command him to utter, or who speaks in the name of other gods—that prophet shall die.” 21And should you ask yourselves, “How can we know that the oracle was not spoken by the LORD?”— 22if the prophet speaks in the name of the LORD and the oracle does not come true, that oracle was not spoken by the LORD; the prophet has uttered it presumptuously: do not stand in dread of him.
19 When the LORD your God has cut down the nations whose land the LORD your God is assigning to you, and you have dispossessed them and settled in their towns and homes, 2you shall set aside three cities in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess. 3You shall survey the distances, and divide into three parts the territory of the country that the LORD your God has allotted to you, so that any manslayer may have a place to flee to. 4—Now this is the case of the manslayer who may flee there and live: one who has killed another unwittingly, without having been his enemy in the past. 5For instance, a man goes with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood; as his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flies off the handle and strikes the other so that he dies. That man shall flee to one of these cities and live.— 6Otherwise, when the distance is great, the blood-avenger, pursuing the manslayer in hot anger, may overtake him and kill him; yet he did not incur the death penalty, since he had never been the other’s enemy. 7That is why I command you: set aside three cities.
8And when the LORD your God enlarges your territory, as He swore to your fathers, and gives you all the land that He promised to give your fathers—9if you faithfully observe all this Instruction that I enjoin upon you this day, to love the LORD your God and to walk in His ways at all times—then you shall add three more towns to those three. 10Thus blood of the innocent will not be shed, bringing bloodguilt upon you in the land that the LORD your God is allotting to you.
11If, however, a person who is the enemy of another lies in wait for him and sets upon him and strikes him a fatal blow and then flees to one of these towns, 12the elders of his town shall have him brought back from there and shall hand him over to the blood-avenger to be put to death; 13you must show him no pity. Thus you will purge Israel of the blood of the innocent,a and it will go well with you.
14You shall not move your countryman’s landmarks, set up by previous generations, in the property that will be allotted to you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess.
15A single witness may not validate against a person any guilt or blame for any offense that may be committed; a case can be valid only on the testimony of two witnesses or more.b 16If a man appears against another to testify maliciously and gives false testimony against him, 17the two parties to the dispute shall appear before the LORD, before the priests or magistrates in authority at the time, 18and the magistrates shall make a thorough investigation. If the man who testified is a false witness, if he has testified falsely against his fellow, 19you shall do to him as he schemed to do to his fellow. Thus you will sweep out evil from your midst; 20others will hear and be afraid, and
