You shall set bread of the presence on the table before me always.
To set the showbread and frankincense before God on the Sabbath
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְנָתַתָּ עַל־הַשֻּׁלְחָן לֶחֶם פָּנִים לְפָנַי תָּמִיד
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להשים לחם הפנים לפניו תמיד והוא אמרו יתעלה ונתת על השלחן לחם פנים לפני תמיד. וכבר ידעת לשון התורה להשים לחם חדש בכל שבת ושיהיה עמו לבונה ושיאכלו הכהנים הלחם הנעשה בשבת הקודם. וכבר נתבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפרק י"א ממנחות. (תרומה, תמידין ומוספין פרק ב'):
That is that he commanded us to place the bread of display always in front of Him. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "And on the table shall you set the bread of display, to be before Me always" (Exodus 25:30). And you already know the language of the Torah about placing new bread every Shabbat, and that frankincense be with it and that the priests eat the bread made for the previous Shabbat (Leviticus 23:8,7,9). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Chapter 11 of Menachot. (See Parashat Terumah; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 2).
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
- Binding in the land of Israel
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- 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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- b. Yoma 21a expanded it homiletically
- b. Menahot 96b-99b expanded it homiletically
- Leviticus Rabbah 3:6 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.172-176 read it allegorically
- De Vita Mosis 2.104 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.142-143 carried a parallel
- Ant. 3.255-256 carried a parallel
The New Testament
- Mark 2:25-26 reinterpreted it David's eating of the showbread cited as precedent for overriding cultic restriction; parallels in Matt 12:3-4, Luke 6:3-4
- Hebrews 9:2 read it allegorically the table and 'bread of the Presence' (ἡ πρόθεσις τῶν ἄρτων) listed among the first tabernacle's furnishings within a typological reading
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homiliae in Leviticum 13 read it allegorically
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 West Semitic practice of setting bread and food offerings on a table before the deity, paralleling the Israelite showbread table; the Priestly formulation reinterprets this by routing consumption to the priests and substituting the frankincense azkarah as the actual divine portion Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Ugaritic ritual corpus: offerings set on the 'table of the gods' (ṯlḥn ilm) in ritual texts (KTU 1.41; 1.148) Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.