Summary of parashat Ki Tetzé
Seventy-four of the 613 commandments (Mitzvot) of the Torah are found in the section Ki Tetzé. These include the laws concerning a beautiful captive, the inheritance rights of the firstborn, the wayward and rebellious son, burial and dignity of the dead, the return of a lost object, sending the mother bird away before taking her young, the responsibility to build a safety fence on the roof of one's own house, and the various forms of Kiláim (prohibited hybrids between plants or between animals).
Also included are the legal proceedings and penalties for adultery, for the rape or seduction of a single woman, and for a husband who falsely accuses his wife of infidelity. The following may not marry a person of Jewish lineage: a bastard, a man of Moabite or Ammonite descent, or a first- or second-generation Edomite or Egyptian.
This section also includes the laws of military camp purity; the prohibition against handing over an escaped slave; the obligation to pay a worker on time and to allow any animal or person working for one to "eat while working"; the proper way to treat a debtor and the prohibition against charging interest on a loan; the laws of divorce (from which many of the marriage laws are derived); the penalty of 39 lashes for transgressing a Torah prohibition; and the procedures for ibum ("levirate marriage") of the wife of a deceased brother who had no children or jalitzá ("taken out of the shoe") in the case where the brother-in-law does not wish to marry her.
Ki Tetzé concludes with the obligation to remember "what Amalek did to you on the way, when you were leaving Egypt""
