Detestable Sacrifices

1You shall not sacrifice to YHWH your God a bull or sheep that has in it a blemish, any serious flaw; for it is an abomination to YHWH your God.

Purge the Idolater

2If there is found among you within one of your gates that YHWH your God is giving to you a man or a woman who has been wicked in the eyes of YHWH your God in transgressing His covenant, 3and who has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, and the sun or the moon or any of the host of the heavens that I have not commanded, 4and it is told to you and you hear it, you shall inquire diligently.

And if indeed true the thing is established—this abomination has been done in Israel— 5then you shall bring out that man or that woman who has committed this wicked thing to your gates—the man or the woman—and you shall stone them with stones and they shall die. 6On the testimony of two witnesses or three witnesses he must surely be put to death; he shall not be put to death on the testimony of one witness. 7The hands of the witnesses shall be the first against him to put him to death, and the hands of all the people afterward. And you shall put away the evil from among you.†

Courts of Law

8If a matter is too hard for you to judge—between guilt for bloodshed, between one judgment or another judgment, or between one punishment or another punishment, matters of controversies within your gates—you shall arise and go up to the place that YHWH your God chooses. 9And you shall come to the priests, the Levites, and to the judge who will be there in those days, and you shall inquire. And they shall pronounce upon you the word of the judgment.

10And you shall do according to the mouth of the word that they pronounce upon you, in that place that YHWH chooses, and you shall be careful to do according to all that they instruct you. 11According to the sentence of the law that they instruct you, and according to the judgment that they tell to you, you shall do; you shall not turn aside from the word that they pronounce to you, to the right or to the left.

12And the man who acts proudly and will not listen to the priest who stands there to serve YHWH your God, or to the judge, that man must die, and you shall put away the evil from Israel. 13And all the people shall hear and be afraid and not act proudly anymore.

Guidelines for a King
(1 Samuel 8:1–9)

14When you come into the land that YHWH your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and say, “I will set over myself a king like all the nations that are around me,” 15you shall surely set over yourself a king whom YHWH your God chooses; from among your brothers you shall set over yourself a king; you may not set over yourself a foreigner, a man who is not your brother.

16Only, he shall not multiply for himself horses nor cause to return the people to Egypt so as to multiply horses, for YHWH has said to you⁺, ‘You⁺ shall not return this way again.’ 17And he shall not multiply for himself wives, and his heart shall not turn away, and silver and gold he shall not multiply for himself greatly.

18And it shall come to pass, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write for himself a copy of this law in a book from the one before the faces of the priests, the Levites. 19And it shall come to pass with him, and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear YHWH his God by carefully observing all the words of this law and doing these statutes, 20that his heart may not be lifted above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment to the right or to the left, that he may prolong his days in his kingdom—he and his children—in the midst of Israel.