Aaron shall burn incense of sweet spices on it every morning. When he tends the lamps, he shall burn it.
To burn the incense offering on the golden altar twice daily
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהִקְטִיר עָלָיו אַהֲרֹן קְטֹרֶת סַמִּים בַּבֹּקֶר בַּבֹּקֶר בְּהֵיטִיבוֹ אֶת־הַנֵּרֹת יַקְטִירֶנָּה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצוה הכהנים להקטיר קטרת בכל יום פעמים על מזבח הזהב והוא אמרו יתברך והקטיר עליו אהרן קטרת סמים בבקר בבקר בהיטיבו את הנרות. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו ומעשה הקטרת בכל יום בתחלת כריתות ובמקומות ממסכת תמיד. (ואתה תצוה, תמידין ומוספין פרק ג'):
That is that He commanded the priests to burn incense every day twice on the golden altar. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "On it Aharon shall burn incense of spices: he shall burn it every morning when he arranges the lamps" (Leviticus 30:7). And the regulations of this commandment and the process of burning every day have already been explained at the beginning of Keritot and various places in Tractate Tamid. (See Parashat Tetzaveh; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offering and Additional Offerings 3.)
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
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 Kept as an ethical principle
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 26a expanded it homiletically
- b. Yoma 44a expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.171-173 (fuller allegory of the four ingredients at 1.275; cf. Quis Heres 196-200) read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.197-199 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Luke 1:8-11 carried a parallel Zechariah performing the incense offering alone in the Holy Place; preserves detailed knowledge of the rite's protocol and solemnity
- Revelation 8:3-4 read it spiritually incense on the golden altar reinterpreted as the prayers of the saints before God's throne
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 temple sacrificial and offering rites; these are primarily lists of animal/vegetal offerings to deities and do not contain an explicit aromatic-incense rubric, but they attest the broader cultic milieu of regular offerings before the gods. No direct prescriptive incense-formula parallel to qetoret sammim is attested. The Priestly source's distinctive feature is the restriction of incense to a single authorized formula and altar Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Ugaritic sacrificial liturgies and offering rituals (KTU 1.41//1.87; 1.109) 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.