You shall do no regular work. You shall offer an offering made by fire to Yahweh.’ ”
Not to do any work on Rosh Hashanah
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כָּל־מְלֶאכֶת עֲבֹדָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ וְהִקְרַבְתֶּם אִשֶּׁה לַיהוָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר מעשות מלאכה ביום ראש השנה. והוא אמרו כל מלאכת עבודה לא תעשו. (שם, שם):
He prohibited doing work on the day of Rosh Hashanah. And that is His saying, "you shall not do any work of labor" (Leviticus 23:25). (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 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
- Lashes (malkot)
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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 23 (Bachodesh ha-Shevi'i) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.188-192 The catalog describes this reception as: philosophized/rationalized
Josephus
- Ant. 3.239-240 affirmed it
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.
- ugaritic texts autumn new-year sacrificial liturgy Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.41 // 1.87 Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (2002)
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.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment subjects individuals to corporal punishment (thirty-nine lashes) for performing productive labor on Rosh Hashanah; modern frameworks treating the person as sovereign over non-harmful activity preclude state-imposed flogging as a sanction for religiously defined inactivity.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; court-administered lashes for working on a festival holy day — a non-violent offense — constitutes corporal punishment that international human-rights law categorically prohibits.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Modern penal proportionality doctrine bars corporal punishment for a non-violent religious-observance offense; the thirty-nine-lash penalty for melekhet avodah on Yom Teru'ah/Rosh Hashanah is disproportionate by any post-Enlightenment sentencing standard.
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abrogated_in_practice
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Malkot jurisdiction requires a qualified Sanhedrin, which the rabbinic tradition regards as having lapsed since the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE); the lashes penalty is de jure in effect but has not been judicially imposed for nearly two millennia.