Deuteronomy 24:5

Deuteronomy is largely a collection of laws Moses gives Israel just before they enter the land they have been promised, and many of them are strikingly humane about ordinary life. This verse is about a man who has just married. For one full year he is released from going out with the army and from being handed public or business obligations. The reason the law gives is simple and almost tender: he is to be at home, and to bring happiness to the wife he has married.

A marriage in that world was the beginning of a whole new household, and the household was the basic unit of the entire community. The law treats that beginning as something worth guarding, so it gives the new couple time. Before the man can be sent to the front or loaded with duties, he gets a year at home for the bond to take root. The same instinct shows up a few chapters earlier, in Deuteronomy 20, where a man who has just built a house, planted a vineyard, or become engaged is sent back from the battle line before the fighting starts.

Underneath the specific rule is a conviction that runs all through Israel's law. New and fragile things need protected time, and that protection is safest when it is written down as a command instead of left to whether anyone happens to feel generous. The same conviction gives Israel a weekly day of rest, and gives the farmland itself a rest every seventh year. A year at home for a newly married couple is one more place where the law deliberately slows the machinery of duty long enough for a life to find its footing.