Commandments · Negative commandments

Not to eat the flesh of a sin offering prepared within the sanctuary

#115 Negative commandment Deuteronomy 12:17

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

וְכָל־חַטָּאת אֲשֶׁר יוּבָא מִדָּמָהּ אֶל־אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לְכַפֵּר בַּקֹּדֶשׁ לֹא תֵאָכֵל בָּאֵשׁ תִּשָּׂרֵף

In Maimonides’ words

How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.

שהזהיר הכהנים מאכול בשר חטאות הנעשות בפנים. והוא אמרו יתעלה וכל חטאת אשר יובא מדמה אל הקדש וגו'. ומי שאכל מהם לוקה. ולשון ספרי לא תאכל באש תשרף כל שהוא טעון שריפה הרי הוא בלא תעשה על אכילתו. (שם, שם פי"א):

That He prohibited the priests from eating the meat of sin-offerings processed inside [the Sanctuary]. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "Every sin-offering whose blood is to be brought to the [...] Sanctuary, etc." (Leviticus 6:23). And one who eats of them is lashed. And the language of the [Sifra] (Sifra, Tzav, Chapter 8:7) is, "'It may not be eaten; it must be burned with fire' - anything that involves burning, involves a negative commandment for its eating. (See Parashat Tzav; Mishneh Torah, Sacrificial Procedure 11.)

Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.

Literary form: a ritual instruction

Applicability

How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.

  • Requires a standing Temple

Classical halakhic consequences

The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.

Imposed by a court

  • Lashes (malkot)

At the hands of Heaven

No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.

Ritual remedy

No ritual remedy is recorded.

How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment

The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.

  • Orthodox Binding
  • Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
  • Reform Not binding
  • Reconstructionist Not binding
  • Karaite As the catalog records it: non applicable

24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.

How later traditions received this commandment

How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.

Josephus

  • Ant. 3.230-232 carried a parallel General treatment of sin-offering procedure rather than a precise parallel to the inner-hattat burning rule

The New Testament

  • Hebrews 13:11-12 reinterpreted it Maps the burning of hattat remains outside the camp onto Jesus's death outside the gate, appropriating Priestly spatial-holiness symbolism for christological typology

Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks

One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.

This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.

  • general principle

    This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.

    The commandment prescribes flogging (malkot, thirty-nine lashes) as the court-imposed sanction for eating inner sin-offering flesh; modern human-rights norms categorically prohibit judicially administered corporal punishment as degrading treatment.

  • Article 7

    This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.

    ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment; the malkot sanction prescribed for this offense is incompatible with that prohibition as interpreted by the Human Rights Committee.

  • general principle

    This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.

    Rabbinic tradition holds that criminal Sanhedrin jurisdiction lapsed with the destruction of the Second Temple; the offense is also temple-dependent, rendering the sanction doubly inoperative — both institutionally and substantively — in any post-70 CE context.

Source & licence

The commentary, cross-references, reception, and modern-conflict analysis in this section are drawn from a public compilation of the 613 commandments, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The cited biblical text is rendered from GEBible’s own public-domain reading corpus. CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab). GEBible’s presentation of this material is offered under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.