Every meal offering of a priest shall be wholly burned. It shall not be eaten.”
Not to eat the flesh of sin offerings whose blood is brought inside the sanctuary
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכָל־חַטָּאת אֲשֶׁר יוּבָא מִדָּמָהּ אֶל־אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לְכַפֵּר בַּקֹּדֶשׁ לֹא תֵאָכֵל בָּאֵשׁ תִּשָּׂרֵף
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהיר הכהנים מאכול בשר חטאות הנעשות בפנים. והוא אמרו יתעלה וכל חטאת אשר יובא מדמה אל הקדש וגו'. ומי שאכל מהם לוקה. ולשון ספרי לא תאכל באש תשרף כל שהוא טעון שריפה הרי הוא בלא תעשה על אכילתו. (שם, שם פי"א):
That He prohibited the priests from eating the meat of sin-offerings processed inside [the Sanctuary]. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "Every sin-offering whose blood is to be brought to the [...] Sanctuary, etc." (Leviticus 6:23). And one who eats of them is lashed. And the language of the [Sifra] (Sifra, Tzav, Chapter 8:7) is, "'It may not be eaten; it must be burned with fire' - anything that involves burning, involves a negative commandment for its eating. (See Parashat Tzav; Mishneh Torah, Sacrificial Procedure 11.)
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
- 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 As the catalog records it: inoperative no temple
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Not 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.
Josephus
- Ant. 3.230-232 rationalized it Discusses sin-offering procedure generally rather than this specific blood-into-sanctuary rule; relevance is broad rather than precise
The New Testament
- Hebrews 13:11-12 reinterpreted it Typological reading: the burning of inner sin-offering carcasses 'outside the camp' is mapped onto Jesus's suffering 'outside the gate'
The Church Fathers
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews, Homily 33 (on Heb 13) read it spiritually Follows and extends the Hebrews 13:11-12 typology rather than offering an independent reading of the Leviticus rubric
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 an incompatible method.
The commandment prescribes flogging (malkot) for eating the flesh of a sin offering whose blood has been brought inside the inner sanctuary, a highly technical Temple-service category; modern penal frameworks recognize no legitimate basis for corporal punishment for non-violent violations of sacrificial food-handling protocols.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; imposing flogging for eating a specific class of sin-offering flesh distinguished by the location of its blood application violates this prohibition.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Modern penal proportionality doctrine precludes corporal punishment for non-violent violations of sacrificial eating rules whose categories depend on inner-sanctuary blood procedures; the malkot sanction for consuming flesh of an inner-blood sin offering exceeds any proportionate response in post-Enlightenment penal theory.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
This commandment is doubly inoperative: both the Temple context on which the prohibition depends and the Sanhedrin's corporal jurisdiction have lapsed since 70 CE; the conflict is de jure, but no enforcement mechanism has existed since then.