It shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for you, and you shall deny yourselves. In the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall keep your Sabbath.”
To rest from work on Yom Kippur
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
שַׁבַּת שַׁבָּתוֹן הוּא לָכֶם וְעִנִּיתֶם אֶת־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם בְּתִשְׁעָה לַחֹדֶשׁ בָּעֶרֶב מֵעֶרֶב עַד־עֶרֶב תִּשְׁבְּתוּ שַׁבַּתְּכֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשבות ביום הכפורים מהמלאכות והמעשים. והוא אמרו יתעלה שבת שבתון הוא לכם. וכבר בארנו פעמים אמרם האי שבת עשה הוא. (אמור אל הכהנים, זמנים הלכות שביתת יו"ט פ"א):
And that is that He commanded us to rest from work and [certain] actions on Yom Kippur. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "It is a Shabbat of Shabbaton for you" (Leviticus 16:31). And we have already explained several times that this rest 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
- Karet — being 'cut off'
Ritual remedy
- A sin-offering (ḥatat)
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 Observed
- Reconstructionist Observed
- 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)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) XXV-XXVII The catalog describes this reception as: harmonizing expansion
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer 46 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.186-188 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.240-243 described it
The New Testament
- Acts 27:9 carried a parallel Yom Kippur referenced as 'the Fast' (hē nēsteia), assuming its observance as a fixed calendrical marker
The Qur'an and hadith
- Sahih al-Bukhari 2004 (fast of ʿAshuraʾ) carried a parallel
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.