Ki Teitzei/Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19
Seventy-four of the Torah’s 613 commandments
(mitzvot) are in the Parshah of Ki Teitzei. These include the laws of
the beautiful captive, the inheritance rights of the firstborn, the wayward and
rebellious son, burial and dignity of the dead, returning a lost object, sending
away the mother bird before taking her young, the duty to erect a safety
fence around the roof of one’s home, and the various forms of kilayim (forbidden plant and animal hybrids).
Also recounted are the judicial procedures and
penalties for adultery, for the rape or seduction of an unmarried girl, and for
a husband who falsely accuses his wife of infidelity. The following cannot marry
a person of Jewish lineage: a mamzer (someone
born from an adulterous or incestuous relationship); a male of Moabite or
Ammonite descent; a first- or second-generation Edomite or Egyptian.
Our Parshah also includes laws governing the purity
of the military camp; the prohibition against turning in an escaped slave; the
duty to pay a worker on time, and to allow anyone working for you—man or
animal—to “eat on the job”; the proper treatment of a debtor, and the
prohibition against charging interest on a loan; the laws of divorce (from which
are also derived many of the laws of marriage); the penalty of thirty-nine
lashes for transgression of a Torah prohibition; and the procedures foryibbum (“levirate marriage”) of the wife of a
deceased childless brother, or chalitzah (“removing of the shoe”) in the case that
the brother-in-law does not wish to marry her.
Ki Teitzei concludes with the obligation
to remember “what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt.”
