“Speak to the children of Israel, saying, ‘In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, there shall be a solemn rest for you, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.
To rest on Rosh Hashanah
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִי בְּאֶחָד לַחֹדֶשׁ יִהְיֶה לָכֶם שַׁבָּתוֹן זִכְרוֹן תְּרוּעָה מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשבות ממלאכה באחד בתשרי. והוא אמרו יתעלה באחד לחדש יהיה לכם שבתון. וכבר קדם לנו האי שבתון עשה הוא. (אמור אל הכהנים, זמנים הלכות שביתת יו"ט פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to rest from work on the First of Tishrei. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "on the first day of the month, you shall have a Shabbaton"(Leviticus 23:24). And we have already [seen] that this [term], Shabbaton, is a positive commandment. (See Parashat Emor; Mishneh Torah, Rest on a Holiday 1.)
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 Binding, with modification
- Karaite Binding
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)
- 4Q321 (Mishmarot calendar) The catalog describes this reception as: calendrically situated
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 23 (Rosh Hashanah pisqa) expanded it homiletically
- Leviticus Rabbah 29:1 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.188-192 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.239-240 affirmed it
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.