Essay su Deuteronomio 25:78

Despite the predominance of “guilt” and “stroke/strike” in this passage, what is stressed in the end is more humanity than punishment.

A number of stories and laws in the Bible clarify how important the continuity of the generations, as represented by carrying on a man’s name, was considered in ancient Israel. Here the law provides for the widow of a man who dies without heirs to provide one, through the institution of “levirate marriage”—whereby the man’s brother marries her, and the subsequent offspring bears the deceased brother’s name. This institution, applied to a more distant relative, vividly appears in the book of Ruth, which in fact contains a ceremony scene (4:1–11) of the kind set forth here.

In a law literally protecting maleness, a wife loses her hand over an act understood by a patriarchal society to be completely intolerable. Not even the close ties of a woman to the males of her family may overrule this (Frymer-Kensky 1992a). But also at issue may be the idea that the convenant is passed on biologically, and hence damaging the genitals damages the covenant (Greenstein, personal communication).

Not only violating “purity” in diet and worship are adjudged “abominations,” but also the practice of falsifying weights and measures. Ethics in business is thus an aspect of serving God properly (as it is in other ancient Near Eastern cultures).

Hearkening back to Ex. 17:8–16, this passage clarifies the crime of the Amalekites against the newly freed Israelites. The attack on the rear was remembered bitterly in the Bible; cf. I Sam. 15 and the book of Esther, where the villain, Haman, is portrayed as a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag.

Parallel to the respect due human beings is that due a working animal. This may also reflect the Israelites’ identification with certain animals in symbolic settings (cf. Eilberg-Schwartz).