Deuteronomy21chapter 21

Deuteronomy 21:1-5

An unsolved killing leaves guilt on the land itself, and the town measured nearest to the body is the town that answers for it. The heifer is one that has never been worked and never drawn in a yoke, and its neck is struck off in a valley that has never been ploughed or sown, so nothing in the rite has been put to human use before. Albert Barnes notes that the heifer is not called a sin offering and that its blood is never brought to an altar, which makes the transaction figurative rather than sacrificial. Standing behind it is Genesis 9:5, where God requires the blood of a man at the hand of every man, so a death that no court can trace still has to be answered by somebody.

Deuteronomy 21:6-9

The elders wash their hands over the beheaded heifer and say in the hearing of the priests that their hands have not shed this blood, neither have their eyes seen it. Psalm 26:6 uses the same picture for innocence, and Matthew 27:24 has Pilate wash his hands before the crowd and call himself innocent of the blood of Christ. Matthew Henry points out that Pilate had the words without the case, since he knew the man before him was innocent and sentenced him anyway. The prayer of verse 8 asks mercy for the whole people rather than for the elders, and the answer is that the blood shall be forgiven them, though nobody in that town did the killing.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14

A woman taken captive is brought into the house and a full month passes before anything else happens, in which she shaves her head, puts off the clothes she was captured in, and mourns her father and her mother. The text gives no reason for the shaving and the nails, and readers have supplied different ones: Adam Clarke takes it as the mark of leaving her former religion, Matthew Henry as a check on the man's desire, and Clarke adds that the Hebrew rendered pare her nails may as easily mean letting them grow. If the man then has no delight in her she goes free where she will, and he may not sell her for money, because thou hast humbled her. Albert Barnes reads the war in view as one against nations outside Canaan, since chapter 7 and chapter 20 give a different rule for the Canaanite cities.

Deuteronomy 21:15-21

Both household laws take the matter out of the father's hands. The double portion is protected against a father's preference for a favoured wife's son, and the phrase used of the firstborn here, the beginning of his strength, is Jacob's phrase for Reuben at Genesis 49:3, spoken in the house where Genesis 29:31 says Leah was hated. Albert Barnes observes that a father could still set the birthright aside for cause, as Jacob did with Reuben, and that what this statute forbids is doing it out of partiality. A stubborn son is then brought by both parents to the elders in the gate and charged as a glutton and a drunkard, the pair of words at Proverbs 23:20, and the stoning is done by the men of the city, while the rabbinic tradition collected in tractate Sanhedrin narrows the conditions so far that it preserves the opinion that no such case ever came to trial.

Deuteronomy 21:22-23

a sin worthy of death: The rule governs a body hung up after execution rather than execution by hanging, and it requires burial the same day so the land is not defiled. Joshua 8:29 and Joshua 10:26 show Joshua keeping it to the hour, and John 19:31 has the same concern raised at the cross on the eve of a sabbath. Galatians 3:13 quotes the line that he that is hanged is accursed of God and applies it to Christ, made a curse for us, and Peter uses the same wood at Acts 5:30 and Acts 10:39. The verse that made a hanged corpse a defilement of the land is therefore the verse Paul reaches for to say where the curse of the law went.