Deuteronomy 17

¹You shall not sacrifice to the LORD your God an ox or a sheep in which is a defect or anything evil; for that is an abomination to the LORD your God.

²If there is found amongst you, within any of your gates which the LORD your God gives you, a man or woman who does that which is evil in the LORD your God’s sight in transgressing his covenant, ³and has gone and served other gods and worshipped them, or the sun, or the moon, or any of the stars of the sky, which I have not commanded, ⁴and you are told, and you have heard of it, then you shall enquire diligently. Behold, if it is true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is done in Israel, ⁵then you shall bring out that man or that woman who has done this evil thing to your gates, even that same man or woman; and you shall stone them to death with stones. ⁶At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, he who is to die shall be put to death. At the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death. ⁷The hands of the witnesses shall be first on him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So you shall remove the evil from amongst you.

⁸If there arises a matter too hard for you in judgement, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within your gates, then you shall arise, and go up to the place which the LORD your God chooses. ⁹You shall come to the priests who are Levites and to the judge who shall be in those days. You shall enquire, and they shall give you the verdict. ¹⁰You shall do according to the decisions of the verdict which they shall give you from that place which the LORD chooses. You shall observe to do according to all that they shall teach you. ¹¹According to the decisions of the law which they shall teach you, and according to the judgement which they shall tell you, you shall do. You shall not turn away from the sentence which they announce to you, to the right hand, nor to the left. ¹²The man who does presumptuously in not listening to the priest who stands to minister there before the LORD your God, or to the judge, even that man shall die. You shall put away the evil from Israel. ¹³All the people shall hear and fear, and do no more presumptuously.

¹⁴When you have come to the land which the LORD your God gives you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” ¹⁵you shall surely set him whom the LORD your God chooses as king over yourselves. You shall set as king over you one from amongst your brothers. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. ¹⁶Only he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he may multiply horses; because the LORD has said to you, “You shall not go back that way again.” ¹⁷He shall not multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away. He shall not greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.

¹⁸It shall be, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write himself a copy of this law in a book, out of that which is before the Levitical priests. ¹⁹It shall be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them; ²⁰that his heart not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he not turn away from the commandment to the right hand, or to the left, to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he and his children, in the middle of Israel.