“ ‘Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; even the first day you shall put away yeast out of your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.
To remove all leaven from one's possession before the fourteenth of Nisan
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
תַּשְׁבִּיתוּ שְּׂאֹר מִבָּתֵּיכֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לבער חמץ מבתינו ביום ארבעה עשר מניסן וזו היא מצות השבתת שאור. והוא אמרו יתברך אך ביום הראשון תשביתו שאור מבתיכם. והנה התבארו דיני מצוה זו בפרק ראשון מפסחים. (בא אל פרעה, זמנים הלכות חמץ ומצה פ"ב):
That is that He commanded us to destroy chametz from our homes on the fourteenth day of Nissan. And this is the commandment of disposal of leaven. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "on the very first day you shall dispose of the leaven from your homes" (Exodus 12:15). And behold the laws of this commandment have already been explained in the first chapter of Pesachim (See Parashat Bo; Mishneh Torah, Leavened and Unleavened Bread 2.)
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.
- Recorded as practiced today
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
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
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 Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Binding, with modification
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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 17:8-9 affirmed it Attests the Passover/Massot festival framework generally rather than the specific tashbitu removal-of-leaven obligation
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 7 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.158-159 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 2.317 affirmed it
- Antiquities 3.249 affirmed it General description of the festival of unleavened bread rather than a specific affirmation of the removal obligation
The New Testament
- 1 Corinthians 5:6-8 read it allegorically Paul reads the removal of the old leaven as purging 'malice and wickedness,' Christ as the Passover sacrifice
- Matthew 16:6-12 read it allegorically 'leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees' as their teaching
- Galatians 5:9 read it allegorically 'a little leaven leavens the whole lump'
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Treatise on the Passover (Peri Pascha) read it spiritually Spiritualization of Passover typology broadly rather than a focused treatment of the leaven-removal command
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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.