They shall give this, everyone who passes over to those who are counted, half a shekel according to the shekel of the sanctuary (the shekel is twenty gerahs); half a shekel for an offering to Yahweh.
To give half a shekel annually for the upkeep of the Tabernacle and Temple
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
זֶה יִתְּנוּ כָּל־הָעֹבֵר עַל־הַפְּקֻדִים מַחֲצִית הַשֶּׁקֶל בְּשֶׁקֶל הַקֹּדֶשׁ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הוא שצונו לתת מחצית השקל בכל שנה. והוא אמרו יתברך ונתנו איש כופר נפשו לה' ואמרו זה יתנו כל העובר על הפקודים מבן עשרים וגו'. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת שקלים, ושם התבאר שהמצוה הזאת אינה נוהגת אלא בפני הבית. (כי תשא, זמנים הלכות שקלים פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to give over a half shekel-coin each year. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "and a man shall give a ransom for his soul to the Lord" (Exodus 30:12), and His saying, "This shall they give, every one that passes among them that are numbered, etc." (Exodus 30:13). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Shekalim; and it is explained there that this commandment is only practiced in the presence of the Temple. (See Parashat Ki Tissa; Mishneh Torah, Sheqel Dues 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.
- 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
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 Not 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.
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)
- 4Q159 (4QOrdinances) frag. 1 ii read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, Piska 2 (Shekalim) expanded it homiletically
- Tanchuma, Ki Tisa 9 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.77-78 affirmed it
Josephus
- Antiquities 16.163-164 affirmed it
- Antiquities 3.194-196 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Matthew 17:24-27 The catalog describes this reception as: affirmed with qualification The didrachma/Temple-tax pericope; the narrative depicts Jesus paying via the coin from the fish's mouth while declaring the 'sons' exempt. The episode is widely read by critical scholars as a theologically-shaped Matthean composition; it is commonly taken as indirect evidence that the tax was operative in the first century CE rather than as a documentary fiscal record.
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- code of hammurabi Hammurabi enumerates his benefactions to the gods and temples as a demonstration of royal favor, presenting temple maintenance as an expression of the king's special patronage relationship with the deity — status-differentiated rather than uniform across the population Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Prologue (i 1 – v 24) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (SBLWAW 6, 1997)
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.