Commandments · Negative commandments

Not to eat sacrificial flesh that was not offered according to prescribed procedure

#116 Negative commandment Deuteronomy 12:17

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

לֹא־תוּכַל לֶאֱכֹל בִּשְׁעָרֶיךָ מַעְשַׂר דְּגָנְךָ וְתִירֹשְׁךָ וְיִצְהָרֶךָ

Literary form: a prohibition

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 Not binding
  • Reform Not binding
  • Reconstructionist Not binding
  • Karaite Not binding

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

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 procedurally invalid sacrificial 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.