Deuteronomy 21:1-17

Settlement for an Unknown Murderer's Crime

21¹ If a dead body is found on the ground, this ground that God, your God, has given you, lying out in the open, and no one knows who killed him, ² your leaders and judges are to go out and measure the distance from the body to the nearest cities. ³ The leaders and judges of the city that is nearest the corpse will then take a heifer that has never been used for work, never had a yoke on it. ⁴ The leaders will take the heifer to a valley with a stream, a valley that has never been plowed or planted, and there break the neck of the heifer. ⁵ The Levitical priests will then step up. God has chosen them to serve him in these matters by settling legal disputes and violent crimes and by pronouncing blessings in God's name. ⁶ Finally, all the leaders of that town that is nearest the body will wash their hands over the heifer that had its neck broken at the stream ⁷ and say, "We didn't kill this man and we didn't see who did it. ⁸ Purify your people Israel whom you redeemed, O God. Clear your people Israel from any guilt in this murder." ⁹ By following these procedures you will have absolved yourselves of any part in the murder because you will have done what is right in God's sight.

Various Laws

¹⁰ When you go to war against your enemies and God, your God, gives you victory and you take prisoners, ¹¹ and then you notice among the prisoners of war a good-looking woman whom you find attractive and would like to marry, ¹² this is what you do: Take her home; have her trim her hair, cut her nails, ¹³ and discard the clothes she was wearing when captured. She is then to stay in your home for a full month, mourning her father and mother. Then you may go to bed with her as husband and wife. ¹⁴ If it turns out you don't like her, you must let her go and live wherever she wishes. But you can't sell her or use her as a slave since you've humiliated her.

¹⁵ When a man has two wives, one loved and the other hated, and they both give him sons, but the firstborn is from the hated wife, ¹⁶ at the time he divides the inheritance with his sons he must not treat the son of the loved wife as the firstborn, cutting out the son of the hated wife, who is the actual firstborn. ¹⁷ No, he must acknowledge the inheritance rights of the real firstborn, the son of the hated wife, by giving him a double share of the inheritance: that son is the first proof of his virility; the rights of the firstborn belong to him.