You must not take for yourself anything that has been placed under judgment. ¹  Then the Lord will relent from his intense anger, show you compassion, have mercy on you, and multiply you as he promised your ancestors.

When it is reported to you and you hear about it, you must investigate carefully. If it is indeed true that such a disgraceful thing ¹  is being done in Israel,

Moreover, he must not accumulate horses for himself or allow the people to return to Egypt to do so, ¹  for the Lord has said you must never again return that way.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “The day of your death is near. Summon Joshua and present yourselves in the tent ¹  of meeting ²  so that I can commission him.” ³  So Moses and Joshua presented themselves in the tent of meeting.

“See now that I, indeed I, am he!” says the Lord, ¹  “and there is no other god besides me. I kill and give life, I smash and I heal, and none can resist ²  my power.

Bless, O Lord, his goods, and be pleased with his efforts; undercut the legs ¹  of any who attack him, and of those who hate him, so that they cannot stand.

Indeed, it was the very hand of the Lord that eliminated them from within ¹  the camp until they were all gone.

However, it was not until ¹  the first day of the eleventh month ²  of the fortieth year ³  that Moses addressed the Israelites just as ⁴  the Lord had instructed him to do.

(I was standing between the Lord and you at that time to reveal to you the message ¹  of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire and would not go up the mountain.) He said:

Now if you forget the Lord your God at all ¹  and follow other gods, worshiping and prostrating yourselves before them, I testify to you today that you will surely be annihilated.

and bring the heifer down to a wadi with flowing water, ¹  to a valley that is neither plowed nor sown. ²  There at the wadi they are to break the heifer’s neck.

discard the clothing she was wearing when captured, ¹  and stay ²  in your house, lamenting for her father and mother for a full month. After that you may have sexual relations ³  with her and become her husband and she your wife.

He will withhold from all of them his children’s flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict ¹  you in your villages.

then both parties to the controversy must stand before the Lord, that is, before the priests and judges ¹  who will be in office in those days.

Understand today that the Lord your God who goes before you is a devouring fire; he will defeat and subdue them before you. You will dispossess and destroy them quickly just as he ¹  has told you.

At the end of every three years you must bring all the tithe of your produce, in that very year, and you must store it up in your villages.

Then Moses called all the people of Israel together and said to them: ¹  “Listen, Israel, to the statutes and ordinances that I am about to deliver to you today; learn them and be careful to keep them!

The Lord commanded us to obey all these statutes and to revere him ¹  so that it may always go well for us and he may preserve us, as he has to this day.

If a man is found kidnapping a person from among his fellow Israelites, ¹  and regards him as mere property ²  and sells him, that kidnapper ³  must die. In this way you will purge ⁴  evil from among you.

Remember the whole way by which he ¹  has brought you these forty years through the desert ²  so that he might, by humbling you, test you to see if you have it within you to keep his commandments or not.