Deuteronomy 17

Revised Geneva Translation

17 “You shall offer to the LORD your God no bullock or sheep in which is a blemish or any defect. For that is an abomination to the LORD your God.

² “If there is found among you in any of your cities which the LORD your God gives you, man or woman who has worked wickedness in the sight of the LORD your God in transgressing His Covenant

³ “and has gone and served other gods and worshipped them (as the Sun or the Moon or any of the host of Heaven which I have not commanded)

⁴ “and it is told to you and you have heard it, then you shall inquire diligently. And if true, the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel,

⁵ “then you shall bring forth to your gates that man or that woman who has committed that wicked thing (man or woman) and shall stone them with stones until they die.

⁶ “At the mouth of two or three witnesses shall he who is worthy of death die. At the mouth of one witness, he shall not die.

⁷ “The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him, to kill him, and then the hands of all the people. Thus you shall take the wicked away from among you.

⁸ “If there arises a matter too hard for you in judgment between blood and blood, between plea and plea, between plague and plague, in the matter of controversy within your gates, then you shall arise and go up to the place which the LORD your God shall choose.

⁹ “And you shall come to the priests of the Levites, and to the Judge that shall be in those days and ask. And they shall show you the sentence of judgment.

¹⁰ “And you shall do according to that thing which they of that place (which the LORD has chosen) show you. And you shall do according to all that they instruct you.

¹¹ “According to the Law which they shall teach you, and according to the judgment which they shall tell you, shall you do. You shall not turn away from the thing which they shall show you, to the right hand or the left.

¹² “And that man who will do presumptuously, not obeying the priest who stands before the LORD your God (to minister there) or to the judge, that man shall die. And you shall take away evil from Israel.

¹³ “So all the people shall hear and fear and do no more presumptuously.

¹⁴ “When you shall come to the land which the LORD your God gives you and shall possess it and dwell in it, if thou say, ‘I will set a king over me, just as all the nations that are around me’,

¹⁵ “you shall make him king over you whom the LORD your God shall choose. From among your brothers shall you make a king over yourselves. You shall not set a stranger over yourself who is not your brother.

¹⁶ “In any case, he shall not prepare many horses for himself, nor bring the people back to Egypt to increase the number of horses, seeing the LORD has said to you, ‘You shall never go that way again’.

¹⁷ “Nor shall he take many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away. Nor shall he gather much silver and gold for himself.

¹⁸ “And when he shall sit upon the throne of his kingdom, then he shall write himself this Law, repeated in a book by the Priest of the Levites.

¹⁹ “And it shall be with him. And he shall read it all days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this Law and to do these Ordinances,

²⁰ “so that his heart is not lifted up above his brothers’ and that he does not turn to the right hand or to the left from the Commandment, so that he may prolong his days in his kingdom (he and his sons) in the midst of Israel.”