Torah Portion Shoftim - Justice You Shall Pursue
Torah: Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9 Haftarah: Isaiah 51:12–52:12 Besorah: John 20:19–29
Picture it. You’re on a jury for a fender bender lawsuit that should take four minutes and somehow eats four days. Two cars, a stop sign, a lot of finger pointing, and twelve strangers stuck in a windowless room arguing about who had the right of way.
If you’ve actually been through something like that, you already know exactly the feeling I’m describing. Somewhere around hour six of imaginary deliberation, I think we can finally understand why Moses didn’t just tell Israel to “be fair.”
He told them to build something. Gates. Officers. A whole system, because apparently God knew that “just be good to each other” was never going to hold up under pressure, not for very long, and not for people who are, you know. People.
Shoftim means judges. This week Israel gets handed the blueprint for a justice system before they’ve even crossed the Jordan, which is either wildly premature or exactly the kind of forward planning you’d expect from a God who has seen how this story goes.
Word Study
The Hebrew word is mishpat, מִשְׁפָּט, and it shows up right there in verse 18 where the judges are told to rule the people with “mishpat tzedek,” righteous judgment. Mishpat is more than a courtroom word. It covers judgment, legal decision, ordinance, prescribed rule, and it’s the same root behind things like the mishpat of the Passover, the mishpat of the firstborn, cases where there’s no verdict being handed down at all, just the right prescribed way something is supposed to be done. So the range is wide. Courtroom justice does fit inside it, but it doesn’t stop there.
So when Israel is told to appoint judges who will rule with mishpat, the ask isn’t merely “don’t be corrupt.” It’s “restore things to the way they’re supposed to be.” Which, if you think about it, is a much bigger job description.
Torah Section
Deuteronomy 16:18 opens plainly enough.
“Judges and officers you are to appoint within all your gates that Adonai your God is giving you, according to your tribes; and they are to judge the people with righteous judgment.”1
Every gate. Not just the capital. Not just wherever the priests happened to be standing that week. Every town, every tribe, its own local court. I think we tend to picture ancient justice as some far off king dispensing rulings from a throne, and there’s some of that later in the chapter so you wouldn’t be wrong, but the baseline system Moses lays out here is shockingly local.
You didn’t travel to Jerusalem to settle a property dispute with your neighbor. You went to the gate of your own town, because that’s where the elders sat, and that’s where the case got heard.
Then verse 19 gets specific about what corrupts a system like that.
“You are not to twist justice—you must not show partiality or take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and distorts the words of the righteous.”1
Even the wise. Even the righteous. Nobody’s exempted from what a bribe does to a mind, which is either deeply humbling or deeply annoying depending on how confident you were feeling about your own integrity five minutes ago.
And then the line the whole parashah gets named for its neighbor:
“Justice, justice you must pursue, so that you may live and possess the land that Adonai your God is giving you.”2
Rashi reads the doubled word as an instruction to seek out a good court, not merely to accept whatever court happens to be closest.3 The repetition is important. I’ve said ad nauseum that repetition is something you should pay attention to. It’s an insistence. Once wasn’t going to be enough for a people who’d need reminding.
Chapter 17 turns to what happens when a case is too hard for the local gate to handle, matters of “bloodshed, legal claims or assault.”4 Those go up to a central court, kohanim and a judge, and the instruction is pretty blunt: do exactly what they tell you, don’t turn to the right or the left.
There’s a system for escalation built in from day one. Local justice for local matters, a higher court for the hard ones, and a demand for total compliance with the ruling once it gets handed down, which I imagine went over about as well then as it does now whenever somebody loses a case they were sure they’d win.
Then, almost startlingly, the text pivots to kings. Deuteronomy 17:14 anticipates a day when Israel will want a king “like all the nations around me.”5 God doesn’t forbid it… He regulates it.
No multiplying horses, no multiplying wives, no multiplying silver and gold, and the king has to write out his own copy of the Torah and read it every day of his life so his heart doesn’t get exalted above his brothers.6 A king who has to sit down and hand copy scripture is a king who just doesn’t get to skim it and claim ignorance.
Chapter 18 moves to prophets, and here’s where it gets personal for anyone who has ever wondered how you tell a true word from God apart from someone who just really wants to be listened to.
“Adonai your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst.”7
A prophet like Moses. Not a replacement for Torah, but someone who speaks into the ongoing life of the nation the way Moses did, and the test for whether the word was real is almost comically simple. Did it come true? Yeah… that’s it.
“When a prophet speaks in Adonai’s Name and the word does not happen or come true, that is a word that Adonai has not spoken.”8
No mysticism required. Miss Cleo was not on speed dial. It was simply wait and see.
Chapter 19 sets up cities of refuge, places where someone who killed another person by accident, no hatred, no malice, no premeditation, an axe head flying off its handle mid swing, could flee and be safe from the avenger of blood until a proper hearing could happen.9
And right alongside that mercy, the text repeats the two or three witness rule from chapter 17, this time attaching a consequence for anyone who lies under oath:
“Then you are to do to him just as he had plotted to do to his brother.”10
The false witness gets sentenced to the very penalty he tried to hang on someone else. Which is either poetic justice or just justice, and maybe those were never supposed to be two different things.
Haftarah
Isaiah 51 and 52 read like the defense’s closing argument after four hundred years of the prosecution getting the only word.
“Listen to Me, you who pursue justice, you who seek Adonai.”11
The exiles in Babylon weren’t wondering whether they had good judges. They were wondering whether the Judge of the whole earth had forgotten the case existed.
“I, I am the One who comforts you,” God says in verse 12, and there’s something almost impatient in the doubling. Then in chapter 52, a herald comes running over the mountains, and the Hebrew word for that herald is mevaser, the same root as besorah, good news, gospel. Every time you’ve heard the word Besorah at the top of these studies, this is where it comes from.
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces shalom.”13
The mevaser gets the beautiful feet AND the good news. The watchmen show up one verse later, spotting him from a distance and lifting their voices the second they see him coming. Two different jobs. One runs the message in, the other stands watch for it. Good news of a verdict finally landing in Israel’s favor. Your God reigns. The captivity is over. Shake off the dust and rise.
Besorah
John 20 opens on a locked room. Fear of the Judean leaders, the text says clearly, and I don’t think we give that detail anywhere near enough weight when we tell this story at Easter with all the trumpets already playing.14
These weren’t people standing around waiting for good news. They were hiding from the possibility of more bad news, and then Yeshua is just there, in the middle of them, saying Shalom aleichem like it’s the most normal evening in the world.
But it’s Thomas I keep circling back to. He wasn’t in the room. He gets the secondhand report, “We have seen the Lord,” and he says something that sounds like stubbornness but is actually, when you run it through Deuteronomy 19, a pretty defensible legal position.
“Unless I see the nail prints in His hands, and put my finger into the mark of the nails, and put my hand in His side, I will never believe.”15
A single witness, or in this case ten, doesn’t establish a matter under Torah. Two or three, and even then you’d want physical evidence where physical evidence was available.
Whether Thomas was consciously thinking through chapter 19 or simply reacting the way anyone shaped by that legal culture would react, his insistence on evidence fits remarkably well within the Torah’s own concern for established testimony. John never tells us what was going through his mind. But the instinct lines up.
Eight days later Yeshua shows up again, doors still locked, and goes straight to Thomas.
“Put your finger here, and look at My hands.”16
He doesn’t rebuke the demand for evidence. He supplies it. And Thomas’s answer is the highest confession in the whole gospel, “My Lord and my God,” offered by the one guy in the room who’d refused to take anyone’s word for it.
Thematic Threads
Justice, justice you shall pursue. “I, I am He who comforts you.” The exact doubling isn’t the same, and “Comfort, comfort My people” belongs to Isaiah 40 rather than this week’s haftarah. But the pattern is familiar… God often emphasizes what matters by saying it twice.
And running underneath both the Torah and Besorah sections is this quiet insistence on witnesses. Two or three witnesses to establish a matter in chapter 17 and again in chapter 19. Not because God doesn’t know the truth without them, but because a community has to have some way of knowing it together, out loud, on the record.
Thomas wanting to see the wounds himself isn’t a failure of faith. It’s a man who grew up under a legal system that told him testimony needs to be established, and he’s asking the risen Messiah to meet that standard. Which He does. Without a single word of complaint about being asked.
My Final Thoughts
I think what gets me most about this portion is how utterly unglamorous it all is. No burning bush moment here. Just gates, and officers, and a repeated word about pursuing what’s right even when the nearest court might not be the good one.
Rashi’s read stuck with me all week, seek out a good court, because it assumes you might have to go looking. Justice was never going to just show up on its own and hand itself to you.
Thomas gets his evidence in a locked room eight days later, and the wounds are still there, not healed over, not smoothed into something easier to look at. Some verdicts leave a mark you can still put your hand into on the other side of resurrection. I don’t fully know what to do with that, so I’m just going to leave it here and you can tell me what you think in the comments. I am always up for the discussion.
Dig Deeper
Meditate on Deuteronomy 16:20 this week and ask where in your own life you’ve settled for the nearest court instead of pursuing a good one. Where have you accepted the first available answer because chasing down a better one felt like more trouble than it was worth?
Read John 20:24–29 a couple of times and notice that Yeshua never once shames Thomas for wanting to see. What would it look like to bring your own doubts to Him as directly as Thomas did, instead of hiding them behind a locked door of your own?
And take a minute with the cities of refuge in chapter 19. Israel was told to build actual, physical places where a person who’d made a terrible mistake without intending harm could be safe while the truth got sorted out. Who in your life needs you to be that kind of refuge this week, a safe place to wait for the whole story to be told, rather than a verdict rushed out before all the evidence is in?
Download This Portion
Download a printable version of this Torah portion along with the study and reflection questions for your study binder!
Hebrew Letter Lesson: The Letter: Hei (ה)
ה
Hei
Shape: An open frame, three strokes, mostly enclosed but with a gap left on the lower left side. Some of the old commentators noticed that gap long before I did and made a whole teaching out of it. It looks a lot like the letter chet, except the chet is fully closed on the left side. So, I always picture Hei as a house with an open door and remember it by saying “Hey, the door is open.”
In This Portion: Hei is the letter of breath. It’s the sound you make when you exhale, barely a consonant at all, almost just air passing through an open mouth. It shows up tucked into God’s own revealed name, and famously, it’s the letter God adds into Abram’s name to make him Abraham, and into Sarai’s to make her Sarah.17
A name change built on breath.
A Little Nugget
Some later Jewish homiletical traditions connect the open gap in the letter’s shape to teshuvah, the idea that a person can always find their way back in through that opening, no matter how far out they’ve wandered. I can’t verify that as the original grammatical reasoning behind the letter’s form, so take it as a piece of later interpretation rather than a fact. But sitting next to a parashah about justice and true witnesses and a Messiah who lets a doubting friend back in through the locked door of his own skepticism, it’s hard not to notice how well it fits.
Application:
Justice, in this portion, is never a cold mechanical process. It’s the LORD’s own breath moving through a system of gates and officers and courts, meant to restore what’s been knocked out of its right order.
Thomas gets let back in through the gap in his own doubt. Nobody slams that door on him.
Where might you need to leave a gap open this week, in a relationship, in your own certainty about something, so someone else has room to come back in.
Weekly Practice
This week, before you make a judgment call about someone, anyone, a coworker, a family member, a stranger in a comment section, pause and ask whether you’re pursuing justice or just taking the nearest available verdict. Rashi’s court is rarely the closest one.
Before You Go
If this study got you thinking about pursuing justice instead of settling for whatever’s closest, I’d love to hear where that’s showing up in your own life this week. Share it with a friend who tends to take the easy answer instead of chasing down the true one.
And if you’re finding yourself wanting to go slower and deeper into weeks like this one, I’ve got you! Paid subscribers get access to live Bible studies, extended studies, devotionals, theological teaching, spiritual formation practices, and a community of women who want depth without pressure or performance. If you’re ready to step further into the Word, you’re welcome inside. 👉🏻 Join The Chavurah. If a paid subscription isn’t feasible right now but this space has blessed you, you can leave a one-time tip here. Every gift helps sustain this work. 💕
About the Author
Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.
She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.
When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.
Notes
1. Deuteronomy 16:18–19, TLV.
2. Deuteronomy 16:20, TLV.
3. Rashi on Deuteronomy 16:20:1, accessed via Sefaria, reads “Justice, justice shall you pursue” as an instruction to seek out a good court, citing Sifrei and Sanhedrin 32b.
4. Deuteronomy 17:8, TLV.
5. Deuteronomy 17:14, TLV.
6. Deuteronomy 17:16–20, TLV.
7. Deuteronomy 18:15, TLV.
8. Deuteronomy 18:22, TLV.
9. Deuteronomy 19:4–5, TLV.
10. Deuteronomy 19:19, TLV.
11. Isaiah 51:1, TLV.
12. Isaiah 51:12, TLV.
13. Isaiah 52:7, TLV.
14. John 20:19, TLV.
15. John 20:25, TLV.
16. John 20:27, TLV.
17. Genesis 17:5, 15. The addition of the letter hei to both Abram’s and Sarai’s names is a widely recognized textual observation, not a claim requiring rabbinic citation.
Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.