Commento su Deuteronomio 13:6

סרה [BECAUSE HE HATH SPOKEN] סרה — i.e. something that is strange in the world (more lit., removed from the world), something which never existed and was never created (a pure invention), and which I never bade him say; detournure in O. F.

'יומת, כי דבר סרה על ה, even though he had claimed to speak in the name of the Lord and not in the name of some other deity, something which had convinced him that his crime was not subject to the death penalty. We encounter such a scenario in Jeremiah 26,16 where the elders of Jerusalem do not want to convict Jeremiah to the death penalty because he had spoken in the name of the Almighty G’d, i.e. had not denied His sovereignty, although he was perceived as a false prophet, no one accepting his predictions of doom and his call to repentance.

והנביא ההוא או חולם החלום ההוא, "And that prophet or the dreamer of that dream, etc." The Torah had to make reference to the prophet and to the dreamer separately; if the Torah had mentioned only the prophet I would have concluded that the death penalty which is the subject of this verse applies only to someone who had already enjoyed the reputation of being a true prophet. After all, the Israelites have been commanded to hearken to the words of a prophet in Deut. 18,15 where the Torah writes "to him (the prophet) you shall hearken." There is no command in the Torah obligating us to hearken to someone who proclaims that G'd appeared to him in a dream and ordered certain things; in fact many dreams are totally without spiritual significance. I would have reasoned that such a person has not misled the people sufficiently to warrant death. By including the dreamer in our verse the Torah makes plain that such a dreamer is equally guilty in the eyes of the law. If, on the other hand, the Torah had legislated the death penalty only for a person described as having had an appearance of G'd in a dream, I would have deduced from this that only the dreamer is guilty of death but that the words of a prophet who has been known to be a legitimate prophet must be taken seriously even when he asks us to violate the commandment and asks us to temporarily violate the commandment involving idolatry because of some emergency.