Parashat Ki Tetze/ParashahSummary

Parashat Ki Tetze – Summary

• Parashat Ki Tetze continues Moshe's discourse on the commandments with 74 laws (the most of any parashah) relating to proper family relationships, family responsibility, honesty, justice, and social consciousness.
  
  
• In the second half of Chapter 21, Moshe instructs the people regarding marriage to female captives of war, inheritance of the firstborn son, the "rebellious son", and the prohibition to leave the body of an executed criminal hanging overnight.
• Chapter 22 outlines commandments related to returning lost objects, sending a mother bird away before taking its chicks, and building a fence around a roof. These are followed by the prohibitions against intermixing species (kilayim) in each of planting, yoking two different animals to the same plow, and clothing (shaatnez) and the commandment of ritual garment fringes (tzitzit). The chapter concludes with the penalties/punishments for defaming one's wife, adultery, and rape.
• Chapter 23 includes laws regarding certain prohibited marriages, hygiene and purity in army encampments, treatment of fugitive slaves, prostitution, charging of interest, fulfilling vows, and the fieldworker's right to eat from the produce he is harvesting.
• Chapter 24 details laws relating to divorce, exemption from military service in the first year of marriage, kidnapping, collateral/security on loans to poor individuals, withholding a worker's wages, justice, and gifts to the poor from the field/vineyard.
• Chapter 25 includes laws regarding the court-administered penalty of lashes (malkot), Levirate marriage (yibbum and chalitzah), and honesty in business. The chapter concludes with an exhortation to remember Amalek's ambush of Israel after the Exodus.

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