Chapter Twenty-One

Laws: concerning the corpse of a slain man when the murderer is unknown; concerning marriage to a captive woman; concerning the right of the firstborn from two wives; concerning the punishment of disobedient children; concerning one executed by hanging.

Deuteronomy 21:1. If in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess, someone is found slain, lying in the field, and it is not known who killed him, Deuteronomy 21:2. then your elders and your judges shall go out and measure the distance to the cities that are around the slain man; Deuteronomy 21:3. and the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has not been worked, that has not pulled a yoke, Deuteronomy 21:4. and the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which has not been plowed or sown, and shall break the heifer’s neck there in the valley; Deuteronomy 21:5. and the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come [for the Lord your God has chosen them to serve him and to bless in the name of the Lord, and by their word every dispute and every injury shall be settled,] Deuteronomy 21:6. and all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, Deuteronomy 21:7. and they shall declare and say: “Our hands did not shed this blood, and our eyes did not see it; Deuteronomy 21:8. “Atone for your people Israel, whom you, O Lord, have redeemed [from the land of Egypt], and do not hold the guilt of innocent blood against your people Israel.” And they shall be absolved from the blood. Deuteronomy 21:9. So shall you purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, if you do what is right in the eyes of the Lord [your God]. The law of retribution and crime prevention required the death penalty for a premeditated murderer (Gen 4:10; Exod 21:14, Num 35:30-34). In cases where the killer was unknown, a symbolic execution of the guilty party was performed along with a rite of hand-washing — as a sign of innocence in the crime and cleansing from the blood of a man shed by an unknown hand.

Deuteronomy 21:10. When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hands and you take them captive, Deuteronomy 21:11. and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her and want to take her as your wife, Deuteronomy 21:12. then you shall bring her into your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails, Deuteronomy 21:13. and she shall remove her captive’s clothing and live in your house and mourn her father and her mother for a full month; and after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife; The lawgiver “does not wish that weeping be mixed with rejoicing, or tears with smiling. Therefore he prescribes that the captive woman be given time for tears, and only then, when she is free from weeping, may she enter into the marriage bond. Beyond this, he also restrains the desire of her captor, commanding that it be guided not by lust but by reason” (blessed Theodoret, Commentary on Deut., question 19). “For,” explains St. Ephrem the Syrian, “if he truly desires to have her (the captive woman) as a wife, he will abstain for the entire time prescribed by the law” (Commentary on Deut., ch. XXI).

Deuteronomy 21:17. but he shall acknowledge the firstborn son of the unloved wife and give him a double portion of all that he has, for he is the firstfruits of his strength; the right of the firstborn belongs to him. The firstborn received a double share of the inheritance, and upon the father’s death entered into the rights and authority of the eldest in the family. Before the centralization of Hebrew worship at the tabernacle and the setting apart of the tribe of Levi for service to Jehovah, the firstborn also had the right to perform patriarchal worship in his own clan.

Deuteronomy 21:18. If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and though they discipline him he will not listen to them, Deuteronomy 21:19. then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, Deuteronomy 21:20. and they shall say to the elders of his city: “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he does not obey us; he is a glutton and a drunkard”; Deuteronomy 21:21. then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall purge the evil from among you, and all Israel shall hear and be afraid. Cf. Exod 20:12, Lev 20:9. The family constitutes one of the atoms from whose aggregate the organism of the state is built. The stability of normal relations within the former largely determines their firmness in the latter as well. In the theocratic state that the Hebrew state was, the welfare of the state is at the same time the welfare of the Church. Hence the strictness that the law manifests with regard to those who violate the fifth commandment. In contrast to the custom and right of other peoples of the ancient world (such as the Romans), which granted the father the power to execute his own children, the law of the Hebrews placed the pronouncing and carrying out of a death sentence in the cases noted by the verses under commentary, as in others, under the jurisdiction of a properly organized court.

Deuteronomy 21:22. If someone has committed a crime worthy of death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, Deuteronomy 21:23. his body shall not remain on the tree overnight, but you shall bury him the same day, for cursed before God is everyone hanged on a tree, and you shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. “Cursed before God is everyone hanged on a tree” — for the crime that he committed.