The Wilderness Years

You are to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress.

And you shall rejoice in your feast—you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, and the Levite, as well as the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widows among you.

For seven days you shall celebrate a feast to the LORD your God in the place He will choose, because the LORD your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that your joy will be complete.

Three times a year all your men are to appear before the LORD your God in the place He will choose: at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tabernacles. No one should appear before the LORD empty-handed.

Everyone must appear with a gift as he is able, according to the blessing the LORD your God has given you.

You are to appoint judges and officials for your tribes in every town that the LORD your God is giving you. They are to judge the people with righteous judgment.

Do not deny justice or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the righteous.

Pursue justice, and justice alone, so that you may live, and you may possess the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole next to the altar you will build for the LORD your God,

and do not set up for yourselves a sacred pillar, which the LORD your God hates.

You shall not sacrifice to the LORD your God an ox or a sheep with any defect or serious flaw, for that is detestable to the LORD your God.

If a man or woman among you in one of the towns that the LORD your God gives you is found doing evil in the sight of the LORD your God by transgressing His covenant

and going to worship other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or moon or any of the host of heaven—which I have forbidden—

and if it is reported and you hear about it, you must investigate it thoroughly. If the report is true and such an abomination has happened in Israel,

you must bring out to your gates the man or woman who has done this evil thing, and you must stone that person to death.

On the testimony of two or three witnesses a man shall be put to death, but he shall not be executed on the testimony of a lone witness.

The hands of the witnesses shall be the first in putting him to death, and after that, the hands of all the people. So you must purge the evil from among you.

If a case is too difficult for you to judge, whether the controversy within your gates is regarding bloodshed, lawsuits, or assaults, you must go up to the place the LORD your God will choose.

You are to go to the Levitical priests and to the judge who presides at that time. Inquire of them, and they will give you a verdict in the case.

You must abide by the verdict they give you at the place the LORD will choose. Be careful to do everything they instruct you,

according to the terms of law they give and the verdict they proclaim. Do not turn aside to the right or to the left from the decision they declare to you.

But the man who acts presumptuously, refusing to listen either to the priest who stands there to serve the LORD your God, or to the judge, must be put to death. You must purge the evil from Israel.

Then all the people will hear and be afraid, and will no longer behave arrogantly.

When you enter the land that the LORD your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,”

you are to appoint over yourselves the king whom the LORD your God shall choose. Appoint a king from among your brothers; you are not to set over yourselves a foreigner who is not one of your brothers.