או שלשה עדים, “or three witnesses.” Seeing that in Exodus 23,2, the Torah had decreed that a majority opinion in disputes is to be accepted, it was necessary to tell us that when it comes to testimony, numbers do not count. In practice this means that if one of the three witnesses in litigation has been found as not trustworthy according to Jewish law, we do not use the fact that the remaining two witnesses are trustworthy as believable, seeing that they form a majority. The entire testimony is declared as null and void because one of the witnesses was disqualified. The same applies if there were 100 witnesses and only one of them was disqualified. If however, two witnesses had come forward concerning a certain court-case, and some relatives of the accused wanted to join these two witnesses,-presumably in order to make the two witnesses useless,- this is not allowed as the relatives had never meant to accuse their kin in the first place of the sin he is accused of. Unless we applied this rule, we would never find two qualified witnesses that could testify to the validity of a marriage ceremony. There are always numerous relatives of the couple present, and anyone could succeed in invalidating that marriage if he so chose.

לבלתי רום לבבו, “so that his heart not feel superior;” this is the reason why the Torah does not wish that the king amass undue amounts of gold and silver.

ולבלתי סור מן המצוה, “and in order that he do not deviate from G–d’s commandments;” this is the reason why a king is commanded to write a Torah scroll personally; this scroll is to accompany him wherever he goes. I have heard an opinion that what was written in that “Torah scroll,” are only the Ten Commandments. Seeing that the Ten Commandments total 613 letters, it is as if this scroll was equivalent to the entire five Books of Moses which contain a total of 613 commandments.