Forty stripes may be given him: in no case could the judge order more than forty lashes to be given to the guilty person. In later times the maximum was reduced to thirty-nine lashes (see 2 Cor 11.24) to make sure that the limit in this law was not exceeded. Another way to express this is “They may not hit him more than forty times with the whip.”

Your brother: that is, your fellow-Israelite. Revised English Bible “your neighbor” is not correct in this context.

Degraded in your sight: the sense is that a fellow-Israelite should not be publicly humiliated or “made to lose face in front of the other Israelites.”

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Deuteronomy. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2000. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .