Open English Translation DEU Chapter 18

18 None of the Levites (including the priests) will receive any land as an inheritance like the other Israelis. Instead, the people’s offerings to Yahweh will be their inheritance to sustain them. 2 Yes, unlike fellow Israelis, they won’t have any inherited land—Yahweh is their inheritance like he told them.[ref]

3 This is the requirement that the people do for the priests: whenever they bring a bull or a sheep as a sacrifice, they must give the shoulder, the cheeks, and the stomach to the priest. 4 Also you must give the Levites the firstfruits of your grain, your grape juice, your olive oil, and the wool shorn from your sheep, 5 because your god Yahweh chose them out of all your tribes for them and their descendants permanently to serve him.

6 If a Levite chooses to move his family from their town in any part of Yisrael and sincerely wants to go to the place that Yahweh will choose, 7 then he can join the other Levites there to serve his god Yahweh 8 and must be given a portion like all the others. (He can keep anything he got from the sale of their family home.)

9 When you enter the land that your god Yahweh is about to give you, don’t imitate the disgusting habits of those peoples. 10 There mustn’t be anyone among you who passes their son or daughter through fire, or who uses divination or omens to try to tell the future, or who practices sorcery,[ref] 11 or who puts spells on people, or who tries to talk to spirits of deceased people, 12 because anyone who does those things is abhorrent to Yahweh. It’s because of those kinds of things that your god Yahweh will drive those other peoples away ahead of you. 13 You must be a blameless nation in the eyes of your god Yahweh,[ref] 14 because the groups that you’ll expel from the land rely on fortune-tellers and diviners, but your god Yahweh won’t allow you to do that.

15 Your god Yahweh will select a man from among you and send him as a prophet like me. You must take notice of him,[ref] 16 since you begged your god Yahweh from the bottom of Mt. Horev when you said, “We can’t handle directly hearing the voice of our god Yahweh and looking at this terrible fire. Let us go home so we won’t die here.” 17 Then Yahweh told me, “They’re right in what they’re saying. 18 I’ll choose a prophet from among them and see him. I’ll tell him what to say, and he can pass it on to them, 19 and if anyone doesn’t listen to what he says with my authority, I’ll punish that person as if they ignored me.[ref] 20 However, if the prophet says things that I didn’t tell him to say but claims they came from me, or if he speaks in the name of other gods, then that prophet must die.”

21 Now if you ask yourselves, “How can we recognise a message that didn’t come from Yahweh?” 22 then when the prophet speaks in Yahweh’s name but that thing doesn’t happen, then you’ll know that it didn’t come from Yahweh. The prophet spoke it assuming that I’d want that, but you don’t need to be afraid of him.