Commandments · Positive commandments

A ritually impure priest must immerse in a mikveh and wait until evening to resume service

#173 Positive commandment Leviticus 22:7

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

וּבָא הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וְטָהֵר וְאַחַר יֹאכַל מִן־הַקֳּדָשִׁים כִּי לַחְמוֹ הוּא

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 Binding, with modification
  • Conservative Not binding
  • Reform Not binding
  • Reconstructionist Not binding
  • Karaite Binding, with modification

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)

  • 1QS 3:4-9 reinterpreted it

Philo of Alexandria

  • De Specialibus Legibus 1.117-118 read it allegorically

Josephus

  • Ant. 3.261-273 affirmed it

The Qur'an and hadith

  • Q 5:6 The catalog describes this reception as: thematic analogue

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 instructions washing and bodily-purity requirements for cultic personnel before approaching the sacred; the Israelite sunset/temporal element is a point of divergence rather than a shared feature Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Instructions to Temple Officials (CTH 264) McMahon, in Hallo (ed.), Context of Scripture vol. 1; cf. Miller, Royal Hittite Instructions to and for the Sons of Pleroma... (SBL 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.

Source & licence

The commentary, cross-references, reception, and modern-conflict analysis in this section are drawn from a public compilation of the 613 commandments, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The cited biblical text is rendered from GEBible’s own public-domain reading corpus. CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab). GEBible’s presentation of this material is offered under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.