Once in the promised land, either God or Moses wants the Israelites to pick themselves a king like the other nations. Their king is not supposed to accrue wealth or many wives or lands though. In other nations, the wealth of the king was supposed to reflect the power and success of the nation, but the Israelite king is not supposed to consider himself better than any other Israelite. This seems to me to sort of beg the question, what is the king of Israel for? They’ve got priests and Levites to interpret the Law for them and even judges to help figure out the really tricky cases in the law, so the king isn’t really necessary for that. If the king is not supposed to be a symbolic figure head either, I don’t know what is left for him to do.
Moses says he’s supposed to write down the entire law and read it very day and his line will reign a long time. It kind of seems like he’s not really reigning at all anyway though, but I guess maybe they just felt the need to have a king on principle.
Israelites are not permitted to consult spirits or practice any kind of witchcraft. God says that it’s this kind of stuff that’s getting the other nations in Canaan destroyed, so He really detests these things. Instead of using divination and sorcery though, the Israelites are going to have prophets. God says He will raise up men to speak for Him and they will tell the future a little bit. Be careful though because there will also be false prophets speaking out of turn and prophets to other gods and those you’re supposed to kill with rocks. The test for prophets is simple enough, although it’s a little hard to check sometimes. If what they say doesn’t come true, they’re false, kill them.
There have to always be several cities of refuge around so that there’s one that’s convenient to get to. The cities or refuge are only for unintentional crimes though. If you murder someone on purpose, the elders of the city will cast you out. It always takes more than one witness to convict someone of a crime though.
One last thing has to do with war. God talks about two kinds of cities the Israelite army will be attacking. Some cities are just in the way, and they will be offered a chance to surrender. If the people surrender, all their stuff and people are plunder for Israel. You can take them off as slaves and keep all their stuff, you just can’t make a treaty with them because that will lead to their culture bleeding into Israelite culture which is unacceptable.
Some cities though, are part of the Israelite inheritance and those cities don’t get to surrender. All the men are to be killed and then all the women and children may be taken as slaves and the goods and livestock plundered, but they are not allowed to accept their surrender. It’s pretty brutal.
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