Bible Chapter Summary
Deuteronomy 25 Summary
Laws on Justice, Marriage, Commerce, and Amalek
Deuteronomy 25 opens with regulations for judicial corporal punishment, capping flogging at forty stripes so that a guilty Israelite is not degraded beyond measure, and forbidding the muzzling of an ox while it threshes grain. The chapter then establishes the levirate marriage law, requiring a surviving brother to marry his deceased brother's childless widow so that the dead man's name endures in Israel, and prescribing a public ceremony of shame—removal of the sandal and spitting in the face—for any brother who refuses the duty. Further laws prohibit the use of dishonest weights and measures, declaring all such unrighteousness an abomination to the LORD, and the chapter closes with a command to remember Amalek's cowardly attack on the weak and weary Israelites during the Exodus and, once Israel is at rest in the land, to blot out Amalek's remembrance entirely.
Key themes
Key verses
Deuteronomy 25:3
“Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee.”
Deuteronomy 25:5
“If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her.”
Deuteronomy 25:15
“But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”
Deuteronomy 25:19
“Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.”
Read Deuteronomy 25 in full
Study the complete chapter with interlinear Hebrew & Greek, verse-by-verse, in the Gospel Daily reader.
Open the full chapter