In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Shoftim ('Judges', Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9) establishes the offices of Israelite society, judges, kings, priests and prophets, with its ringing charge 'justice, justice shall you pursue' (16:20). It treats the cities of refuge, the true and false prophet, and the conduct of war.
Shoftim's law of the king (17:14-20), which forbids the monarch to multiply horses, wives or silver and gold, reads to many scholars as a pointed retrospective critique of Solomon, whose reign 1 Kings 10-11 describes in terms that violate all three prohibitions at once, a resemblance taken as further evidence that Deuteronomy's law collection was shaped, or at least edited, well after the events it purports to anticipate. The test for a true prophet, that an unfulfilled prediction marks a false one (18:21-22), became a central text in later Jewish and Christian debates over prophetic authority, and Maimonides drew on it directly in laying out his own criteria for verifying a prophet's legitimacy.