“The Levitical priests, all the tribe of Levi, shall have no
portion or inheritance with Israel. They shall eat the LORD's food
offerings as their inheritance. They shall have no inheritance
among their brothers; the LORD is their inheritance, as he promised
them. And this shall be the priests' due from the people, from
those offering a sacrifice, whether an ox or a sheep: they shall
give to the priest the shoulder and the two cheeks and the stomach.
The firstfruits of your grain, of your wine and of your oil, and
the first fleece of your sheep, you shall give him. For the LORD
your God has chosen him out of all your tribes to stand and
minister in the name of the LORD, him and his sons for all time.
“And if a Levite comes from any of your towns out of all Israel,
where he lives—and he may come when he desires—to the place that
the LORD will choose, and ministers in the name of the LORD his
God, like all his fellow Levites who stand to minister there before
the LORD, then he may have equal portions to eat, besides what he
receives from the sale of his patrimony.
“When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving
you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of
those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns
his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices
divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or
a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the
dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD.
And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them
out before you. You shall be blameless before the LORD your God,
for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to
fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God
has not allowed you to do this.
“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from
among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as
you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the
assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the
LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the
LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will
raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And
I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all
that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he
shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. But the
prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not
commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods,
that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How
may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’—when a prophet
speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass
or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the
prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of
him.
