“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
To observe the Sabbath day and refrain from work
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
זָכוֹר אֶת־יוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת לְקַדְּשׁוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שנשבות בשבת והוא אמרו יתברך וביום השביעי תשבות. והנה נכפל צווי מצוה זו פעמים ובאר לנו שהשביתה ממלאכות היא חובה עלינו ועל בהמתנו ועבדינו. והנה התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת שבת ויום טוב. (כי תשא, זמנים הלכות שביתת שבת פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to rest on Shabbat. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "but on the seventh day you shall rest" (Exodus 23:12). And note that this commandment has been repeated several times. And He explained to us that rest from types of work is an obligation upon us and upon our animals and our slaves. And behold that the regulations of this commandment have been explained in Tractate Shabbat and [Beitzah]. (See Parashat Ki Tissa; Mishneh Torah, Shabbat 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 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, with modification
- 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)
- CD 10:14-11:18 read it more strictly
- 4Q264a (4QHalakha B) read it more strictly
- Jubilees 2:17-33; 50:6-13 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 11:1-9 expanded it homiletically
- b. Shabbat 119b expanded it homiletically
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Bahodesh 7 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.56-70 rationalized it
- De Decalogo 96-105 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 1.33 The catalog describes this reception as: paraphrastic etiological
- Contra Apionem 2.282 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Mark 2:23-28 reinterpreted it 'the Sabbath was made for man'; Jesus contests halakhic stringency while affirming the Sabbath itself
- Matthew 12:1-14 reinterpreted it permits acts of mercy and necessity on the Sabbath
- Colossians 2:16-17 treated it as abrogated Sabbath treated as a 'shadow' superseded in Christ
- Hebrews 4:1-11 read it spiritually sabbatismos as eschatological rest
The Church Fathers
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 18-23 rejected it polemically
- Epistle of Barnabas, Barnabas 15 read it spiritually
- Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram 4.11-13 read it allegorically
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:65; 4:47; 7:163 carried a parallel
- Q 16:124 rejected it polemically
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.
- mesopotamian omen series periodic taboo/inauspicious days restricted to the king Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Inbu bēl arḫi; 7th/14th/19th/21st/28th of the month (the 19th being the 'day of wrath') Livingstone, Hemerologies of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (CUSAS 25, CDL Press, 2013)
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.