1. If controversy arises between people, they should go to court for judgment. When the judges hear the case, they shall exonerate the innocent but condemn the guilty.
2. Then, if the guilty person is sentenced to a beating, the judge shall force him to lie down and be beaten in his presence with the number of blows his wicked behavior deserves.
3. The judge may sentence him to forty blows, but no more. If he is struck with more than these, you might view your fellow Israelite with contempt.
4. You must not muzzle your ox when it is treading grain.
5. If brothers live together and one of them dies without having a son, the dead man’s wife must not remarry someone outside the family. Instead, her late husband’s brother must go to her, marry her, and perform the duty of a brother-in-law.
6. Then the first son she bears will continue the name of the dead brother, thus preventing his name from being blotted out of Israel.
7. But if the man does not want to marry his brother’s widow, then she must go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to preserve his brother’s name in Israel; he is unwilling to perform the duty of a brother-in-law to me!”
8. Then the elders of his city must summon him and speak to him. If he persists, saying, “I don’t want to marry her,”
9. then his sister-in-law must approach him in view of the elders, remove his sandal from his foot, and spit in his face. She will then respond, “Thus may it be done to any man who does not maintain his brother’s family line!”
10. His family name will be referred to in Israel as “the family of the one whose sandal was removed.”
11. If two men get into a hand-to-hand fight, and the wife of one of them gets involved to help her husband against his attacker, and she reaches out her hand and grabs his genitals,
12. then you must cut off her hand – do not pity her.