Deuteronomy17chapter 17

The hard case goes up to the place which the Lord thy God shall choose, a phrase this book uses fifteen times between chapters 12 and 26 and never once attaches to a named town. Deuteronomy 1:17 had told the local judges to bring the cause too hard for them to Moses, and this statute puts a standing court where Moses had stood. The bench is the priests the Levites together with the judge that shall be in those days, and it hears what verse 8 calls blood and blood, plea and plea, stroke and stroke. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown identify the later form of this tribunal with the Sanhedrin.

The ruling binds, and the words about declining neither to the right hand nor to the left are the words laid on the whole nation at Deuteronomy 5:32 and on the king himself at verse 20. Rabbinic tradition rested the standing authority of its own courts on these two verses, and readers have long differed over how far one ruling reaches past the case that produced it. Matthew 23:2-3 has Jesus telling the crowd to do what those who sit in Moses' seat bid them, while warning them off copying what those men do.

Refusing the court's decision is capital, and the word is presumptuously, which carries the distinction Numbers 15:30 draws between a sin of ignorance and a sin done with a high hand. Adam Clarke reads the offence as rebellion against the highest authority in the land, and Matthew Henry allows that honest difference of opinion from weakness is a separate thing and must be borne with. Verse 13 states the purpose, that all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously, a formula this book repeats at 13:11, 19:20 and 21:21.

The request is quoted back almost word for word at 1 Samuel 8:5 and 8:20, where Israel asks for a king to judge us like all the nations. Matthew Henry reads the law as permission rather than promise, since the conditions in the verses that follow assume the request will one day be made and granted. The choice belongs to God and the man must come from among thy brethren, which is what 1 Samuel 10:24 and 16:1 show happening. Albert Barnes notes that later Jewish reading stretched the ban on a stranger to cover every office, which is part of what gave the question about tribute to Caesar at Matthew 22:17 its edge.

The first prohibition has two halves, the horses and the road they would be fetched along. Egypt was the horse market of the region, and 1 Kings 10:28-29 says Solomon's horses were brought out of Egypt, a chariot at six hundred shekels of silver and a horse at a hundred and fifty. The clause forasmuch as the Lord hath said unto you points back to Exodus 14:13, where Israel was told it would see the Egyptians again no more for ever. Adam Clarke gives two grounds for the rule, the traffic with Egypt itself and the confidence a mounted army invites, which is what Psalm 20:7 and Isaiah 31:1 press.

Two more prohibitions, and the text supplies the reason for the first of them, that his heart turn not away. The account at 1 Kings 11:1-4 gives Solomon seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines and then says his wives turned away his heart, which is the exact ground this verse states. On the third clause, 1 Kings 10:14 counts six hundred threescore and six talents of gold coming in during a single year and 1 Kings 10:27 says the king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones. Albert Barnes reads all three clauses as forbidding excess rather than possession, since the king plainly had horses, a wife and a treasury.

The king copies the law out from the master text held by the priests the Levites, and the Jewish tradition Adam Clarke reports has him do it with his own hand rather than a scribe's. The Hebrew behind a copy of this law is mishneh hattorah, which the Septuagint rendered to deuteronomion touto, and the name of the whole book came into Latin and English from that rendering. Matthew Henry weighs what the demand costs a man whose hands are full of a kingdom's business from the day he takes the throne. 2 Kings 11:12 puts the testimony into the hands of Joash at his crowning, and 2 Kings 22 has Josiah hearing a book of the law that had gone missing.

He reads in it all the days of his life, and the stated purpose is that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, so the king is a pupil of the law before he is its enforcer. Verse 20 gives the second purpose, that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, which puts the throne under the same book as the man in the field. Turning aside neither to the right hand nor to the left has already been laid on the nation at Deuteronomy 5:32 and on the courts at verse 11, and Joshua 1:7-8 lays it on Moses' successor with this same book in view. The promise attached is length of days for him and for his children in the midst of Israel, and 1 Kings 11:11-13 is where that promise gets measured against Solomon.