¹You shall not sacrifice to the Lord your God an ox or a sheep which has a blemish – any bad feature – for that is an abomination to the Lord your God. ²If a man or a woman is found in your midst within any of your gates which the Lord your God is giving you, who does what is wrong in the eyes of the Lord your God, by transgressing his covenant, ³and if he departs and serves other gods and worships them, either the sun or the moon, or any of the array of heaven, which I have not commanded, ⁴and if a case is reported to you, and you hear it, and you inquire diligently, and if it is true – if the matter is established – that this abomination has been committed in Israel, ⁵then you will bring out to your gates that man or that woman who did this evil thing – the man or the woman – and you will stone them so that they die. ⁶On the attestation of two witnesses or three witnesses, he who is on a capital charge will be put to death. He shall not be put to death on the attestation of one witness. ⁷The hand of the witnesses will be on him first, to put him to death, and the hand of all the people afterwards, and you will eradicate the evil out of your midst. ⁸If a case is too difficult for you in judgment between blood shed by the parties, between accusations made by the parties, or between violence committed by the parties – the words of the contentions at your gates – then you will arise and go up to the place which the Lord your God chooses. ⁹And you will go to the Levite priests and to the judge who is in office in those days, and you will inquire, and they will tell you the judicial verdict. ¹⁰And you will act according to the verdict which they tell you from that place, which the Lord chooses, and you will ensure that you do everything that they instruct you. ¹¹You shall act according to the law about which they instruct you, and according to the judgment which they tell you. You shall not deviate either to the right or to the left from the pronouncement which they tell you. ¹²And as for the man who acts defiantly, by not obeying the priest who stands ready to serve the Lord your God there, or the judge, that man shall die, and you will eradicate the evil from Israel. ¹³And all the people will hear it, and fear, and they will not act defiantly any more. ¹⁴When you come to the land which the Lord your God is giving you, and you take possession of it, and you live in it, and you say, ‘Let me appoint a king over me like all the nations which are around me’, ¹⁵you will certainly appoint a king over you whom the Lord your God chooses. You will appoint a king over you from the midst of your brothers. You cannot appoint a foreign man, who is not your brother, over you. ¹⁶But he shall not acquire masses of horses, and he shall not make the people return to Egypt in order to increase the number of horses, for the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall not return by that way any more.’ ¹⁷And he shall not acquire a large number of wives for himself, so that his heart does not swerve, and he shall not acquire a vast amount of silver and gold for himself. ¹⁸And it shall come to pass, as he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write out for himself a copy of this law in a book in the presence of the Levite priests. ¹⁹And it will be with him, and he will read from it all the days of his life, in order to learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, by carrying them out, ²⁰so that his heart does not become haughtier than that of his brothers, and so that he does not deviate from the body of commandments to the right or to the left, so that he may prolong his days over his kingdom – he and his sons in the midst of Israel.