Behold, because Yahweh has given you the Sabbath, therefore he gives you on the sixth day the bread of two days. Everyone stay in his place. Let no one go out of his place on the seventh day.”
Not to walk beyond the prescribed Sabbath limits
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אַל־יֵצֵא אִישׁ מִמְּקֹמוֹ בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר שלא להלוך חוץ לתחום המדינה בשבת. והוא אמרו אל יצא איש ממקומו ביום השביעי, ובאה הקבלה שגבול ההליכה שהיא אסורה מה שנוסף על אלפים אמה חוץ מן המדינה ואפילו אמה אחת וללכת אלפים אמה לכל צד מותר. ולשון מכילתא אל יצא איש ממקומו אלו אלפים אמה. ובמסכת עירובין (דף י"ז:) אמרו לוקין על איסורי תחומין דבר תורה. ושם התבארו משפטי מצוה זו. (בשלח, זמנים הלכות שבת פכ"ו):
He prohibited - not walking outside of the city's perimeter on Shabbat. And that is his saying, "let no one leave his place on the seventh day" (Exodus 16:29). And the tradition comes about it - that the limit of walking is that it is forbidden beyond two thousand ells outside of the city, even [only] one ell. But it is permissible to walk two thousand ells in every direction. And the language of the Mekhilta (Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael 16:29:1) is "'Let no one leave his place' - that is the two thousand ells. And in Tractate Eruvin (Eruvin 17b), they said, "We give lashes for the prohibition of perimeters, from the Torah." And the regulations of this commandment have been explained there. (See Parashat Beshalach; Mishneh Torah, Shabbat 26.)
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 prohibition
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 Not binding
- 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 10:21 read it more strictly
- CD 11:5-6 The catalog describes this reception as: stringent reinterpretation (related Sabbath restriction on walking after animals, not a distinct teḥum distance)
Rabbinic aggadah
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Vayassa 5 The catalog describes this reception as: halakhic exegetical expansion
The New Testament
- Acts 1:12 The catalog describes this reception as: presupposed References a 'Sabbath day's journey' (Σαββάτου ὁδόν) as a known measure, descriptively attesting first-century familiarity with the travel limit
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.
- hittite laws no parallel — Hittite corpus contains no weekly rest-day travel restriction Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast n/a Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites (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.