You shall dwell in temporary shelters for seven days. All who are native-born in Israel shall dwell in temporary shelters,
To dwell in a sukkah (booth) for seven days during Sukkot
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
בַּסֻּכֹּת תֵּשְׁבוּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים כָּל־הָאֶזְרָח בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל יֵשְׁבוּ בַּסֻּכֹּת
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לישב בסוכה שבעת ימים בימי החג. והוא אמרו יתברך בסוכות תשבו שבעת ימים. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת סוכה. ואין הנשים חייבות בה. (אמור אל הכהנים, זמנים הלכות שופר וסוכה ולולב פ"ו):
That is that He commanded us to dwell in the Sukkah seven days on the days of the holiday. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "And you shall dwell in Sukkot seven days" (Leviticus 23:42). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Sukkah. (See Parashat Emor; Mishneh Torah, Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 6.)
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 flat, unconditional command
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
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) cols. 42-43 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- b. Sukkah 11b expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.204-213 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.244-247 affirmed it
The New Testament
- John 7:2 carried a parallel Jesus attends 'the feast of Tabernacles (skēnopēgia)'; the festival forms narrative backdrop without booth-dwelling halakhah
- Revelation 7:15 read it spiritually God 'will spread his tent (skēnōsei) over them' — possible eschatological echo of sukkah imagery
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.