For a person who had a charge brought against them and were brought before a religious prosecution, the charge was considered as established only on the evidence of two or three sworn witnesses.

The Hebrew Bible contains a number of prohibitions against false witness, lying, spreading false reports, etc. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. Offenses against the truth express by word or deed a refusal to commit oneself to moral uprightness: they are fundamental infidelities to God and, in this sense, they undermine the foundations of covenant with God.

This moral prescription flows from the command for holy people to bear witness to their deity. The command against false testimony is seen as a natural consequence of the command to “love your neighbour as yourself”. The Book of Exodus describes the Ten Commandments as being spoken by God, inscribed on two stone tablets by the finger of God, broken by Moses, and rewritten by Yahweh on a replacement set of stones hewn by Moses.

' Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour' (Exodus 20:16) is one of the Ten Commandments, widely understood as moral imperatives by Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant scholars. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour, Lucas Cranach the elder

The Jewish Neighbor by A.M. Khalifa