Measured Punishment and Measures That Do Not Lie

“Justify” and “condemn” are courtroom verbs: to declare a party in the right and to declare a party in the wrong. Neither describes changing anyone’s character. Proverbs 17:15 turns the pair upside down to name the worst corruption of a judge: “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just”.

The judge does not leave the punishment to others out of sight: it is carried out “before his face”, in his presence. “By a certain number” is literally “by count”, so the blows are numbered aloud rather than laid on until someone’s anger is spent.

Jewish practice stopped at thirty nine so as not to overshoot forty by miscounting (Mishnah Makkot 3:10), which is why Paul says five times he received “forty stripes save one” (2 Corinthians 11:24). “Seem vile” is niqlah, to be made light, of no weight: the opposite of honour, which in Hebrew is heaviness.

Grain was threshed by driving oxen round and round over the sheaves on a hard floor, often dragging a studded sledge. A muzzled ox would walk all day over food it could smell and not touch. Hosea 10:11 pictures Ephraim as a heifer that “loveth to tread out the corn”, the pleasant work where the animal eats as it goes.

“Husband’s brother” is yabam, and the Latin for the same relative, levir, gives the practice its usual name, levirate marriage. “A stranger” here is zar, an outsider to the family, not a foreigner. The phrase “if brethren dwell together” limits the duty to brothers still sharing the family holding.

The first son is counted as the dead man’s, heir to his name and his share of the land. Onan in Genesis 38:9 knew exactly this and refused it: “Onan knew that the seed should not be his.” The Book of Deuteronomy turns what was family custom there into a written law with a public remedy.

The widow is the one who “goes up” to the gate and speaks; the law hands her the initiative. She states his refusal in the law’s own language, to “raise up unto his brother a name in Israel”, so the charge is framed as his failure towards the dead, not a slight to her.

The elders summon and talk before anything else happens: persuasion comes first. “Stand to it” means he persists. His refusal, “I like not to take her”, is recorded in his own words, which become part of the public act that follows.

A sandal stood for the right to walk a property: “over Edom will I cast out my shoe” (Psalm 60:8). Spitting in the face was deep disgrace (Numbers 12:14). “Build up” is banah, which sounds like ben, son: the brother who would not build a house would not give his brother a son.

His household gets a nickname, and it sticks. From this verse the rabbis named the whole ceremony chalitzah, the loosing, and it is still performed in Orthodox Judaism to release a childless widow to remarry.

Exodus 21:22 also opened a case with men fighting, where a pregnant woman standing by is hurt. Here the woman is not a bystander; she steps in. “Secrets” is mebushim, literally “the shameful parts”, a word found nowhere else in the Old Testament.

“Thine eye shall not pity” is a Deuteronomic phrase reserved for cases where compassion would undo the law: the enticer to idolatry (13:8), the murderer (19:13) and the false witness (19:21). This is its last appearance. Apart from the eye for an eye formula, it is the only prescribed mutilation in the Law of Moses.

Weights were stones, and the Hebrew says literally “a stone and a stone”: two that look alike, one heavy, one light. The bag is the merchant’s purse where they were kept. Proverbs 16:11 says “all the weights of the bag are his work”, the LORD’s.

The Hebrew again doubles the word: “an ephah and an ephah”, the dry measure for grain. Amos 8:5 quotes the traders of Israel wishing the Sabbath over so they could be back at it, “making the ephah small, and the shekel great”.

“Perfect” is shelemah, whole, from the same root as shalom: a weight with nothing shaved off it. The promise of lengthened days has been attached to few commands: to honouring parents (5:16), to the bird’s nest (22:7), and here to an honest weight.

“Unrighteously” is avel, twisted or crooked dealing. Proverbs 11:1 says it in the language of this verse: “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.” The verse widens from the weights to “all that do unrighteously”.

“Remember” is zakhor, the same form that opens the Sabbath command in Exodus 20:8. The attack itself is recorded at Rephidim (Exodus 17:8–16), where Joshua fought and Moses held up his hands. Synagogues read these last three verses on the Sabbath before Purim, called Shabbat Zachor after this verse’s first word.

“Smote the hindmost” is one Hebrew verb built on the word for a tail, meaning to cut off a column’s rear. It occurs again only in Joshua 10:19. “Met thee” is from a root meaning to happen upon, as though Amalek simply chanced on them, which makes what follows sharper.

In Exodus 17:14 God said “I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” and had Moses write it in a book. Here the task passes to Israel, deferred until the land has rest. Haman is called “the Agagite” (Esther 3:1), after Agag king of Amalek, and so Jewish reading linked this verse with Purim.