Deuteronomy 24:5-22--Miscellaneous Laws

Deuteronomy 24:5-22
English Standard Version

Miscellaneous Laws
5 “When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be liable for any other public duty. He shall be free at home one year to be happy with his wife whom he has taken.

6 “No one shall take a mill or an upper millstone in pledge, for that would be taking a life in pledge.

7 “If a man is found stealing one of his brothers of the people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

8 “Take care, in a case of leprous disease, to be very careful to do according to all that the Levitical priests shall direct you. As I commanded them, so you shall be careful to do. 9 Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam on the way as you came out of Egypt.

10 “When you make your neighbor a loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to collect his pledge. 11 You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you make the loan shall bring the pledge out to you. 12 And if he is a poor man, you shall not sleep in his pledge. 13 You shall restore to him the pledge as the sun sets, that he may sleep in his cloak and bless you. And it shall be righteousness for you before the LORD your God.

14 “You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns. 15 You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the LORD, and you be guilty of sin.

16 “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.

17 “You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow's garment in pledge, 18 but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

19 “When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. 20 When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over them again. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow. 21 When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not strip it afterward. It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow. 22 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this.

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Another set of miscellaneous laws.  If a man was newly married his only obligation for the first year was to be with his wife and enjoy being married.  After this, he was eligible to be forced to serve in the military or other public service as required by the Law (priests serving in the temple and other positions Levites held come to mind).

No one should take a millstone--the means by which someone would grind the grain to make flour in order to make bread for their family--as a pledge for a loan.  I don't think this applies only to the actual millstone, but I think it's a probably a little broader than that as to say don't make someone give you something in collateral that they need to feed themselves or their family or that they need to survive.  If they are in that desperate of need that the only thing they can give in collateral is the means of feeding their family, then you need to just give them the money and not loan it to them.  There are other similar rules that follow this same principle in the Law.

Human trafficking and slave trading is illegal and is an offense punishable by death in the Law.  We miss this so much, but the kind of slavery that we think about in our history was not something that the Bible condones, it in fact expressly forbids it.  Here it is specifically forbidden for the Israelites to treat each other this way, but there are specific rules about slaves that are POW's or those who are from other nations who willingly surrender themselves to Israelites.  We already studied some of those rules and laws.  Never was human trafficking, even of Gentile slaves, permitted by God.

The LORD commands the people to be careful about any leprous disease and to do exactly what is prescribed by the Law that the Levites would teach the people and do what they commanded.  We already studied all these laws and regulations in the book of Leviticus.

When collecting on a loan, the lender was never to go into someone's house to collect collateral.  This is one of the other laws I was thinking about when I mentioned the previous principle.  If the pledge that had to be given was what the person used to cover themselves to sleep, then the lender could not keep their pledge overnight and had to return it to them. 

We then jump back to the issue of how to treat servants/workers.  They were never to be mistreated or oppressed and should always be paid fairly (another indictment on the slave trade that we had in early days of what we know as the United States, but also other areas of the world).  Everyone was to be paid every day for the work that they did.

A father (or mother) should not be held liable to the point of death for the sins or crimes of his (or her) children, nor should a child pay for the crimes of his or her parent(s).  Each person is responsible to pay for their own crimes.

Again we come back to not taking advantage of the poor or the foreigner among them.  They were to give justice to everyone, even those that were not wealthy or not citizens of Israel.  Again we see that a poor person's cloak (this time the cloak of a widow) should not be taken as a pledge.  If she's that desperate that all she has to give in pledge is the clothes off her back, then she needs to be given what she needs and no one needs to be trying to give her a loan.

The last rule here is one will see later in the book of Ruth.  God knew that they would not reap 100% of their harvest on the first pass, and they were not to make a second pass.  Instead, anything that was leftover after their first pass of reaping their harvest was to be left for those who poor--the widows and sojourners and orphans.

The LORD keeps bringing the people back to the idea to not oppress or take care of those in bad circumstances because they were once in those kinds of circumstances when they were slaves in Egypt, but the LORD had redeemed them.  They were never to treat others the way they had been treated, for the LORD heard their cries and judges Egypt for how they treated the Israelites.  Would Israel now want to come under the same condemnation?