Seventy-four of the Torah’s 613 commandments (mitzvot) are in the Parshah of Ki Teitzei. These include the laws of the

• beautiful captive, the inheritance rights of the firstborn, the wayward and rebellious son,
• burial and dignity of the dead,
• returning a lost object, sending away the mother bird before taking her young,
• the duty to erect a safety fence around the roof of one’s home,

and

• the various forms of kilayim (forbidden plant and animal hybrids).

Also recounted are the judicial procedures and penalties for:

• adultery,
• for the rape or seduction of an unmarried girl,

and

• for a husband who falsely accuses his wife of infidelity.

The following cannot marry a person of Jewish lineage:

• a mamzer (someone born from an adulterous or incestuous relationship);
• a male of Moabite or Ammonite descent;
• a first- or second-generation Edomite or Egyptian.

Our Parshah also includes:

• laws governing the purity of the military camp;
• the prohibition against turning in an escaped slave;
• the duty to pay a worker on time, and to allow anyone working for you—man or animal—to “eat on the job”;
• the proper treatment of a debtor, and the prohibition against charging interest on a loan;
• the laws of divorce (from which are also derived many of the laws of marriage);
• the penalty of thirty-nine lashes for transgression of a Torah prohibition;

and

• the procedures for yibbum (“levirate marriage”) of the wife of a deceased childless brother, or chalitzah (“removing of the shoe”) in the case that the brother-in-law does not wish to marry her.

Ki Teitzei concludes with the obligation to remember “what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt.”