They shall be joined to you and keep the responsibility of the Tent of Meeting, for all the service of the Tent. A stranger shall not come near to you.
To guard the Temple at all times by the priests and Levites
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְנִלְווּ עָלֶיךָ וְשָׁמְרוּ אֶת־מִשְׁמֶרֶת אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לְכֹל עֲבֹדַת הָאֹהֶל
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשמור המקדש וללכת סביבו תמיד לכבדו ולרוממו ולגדלו, והוא אמרו לאהרן ואתה ובניך אתך לפני אהל העדות רוצה לומר אתם תהיו לי לפני תמיד. וכבר נכפל זה הצווי בלשון אחר והוא אמרו ושמרו את משמרת אהל מועד. וכתוב בספרי ואתה ובניך אתך לפני אהל העדות הכהנים מבפנים והלוים מבחוץ, רוצה לומר לשמרו וללכת סביבו. ובמכילתא אמרו ושמרו את משמרת אהל מועד אין לי אלא בעשה בלא תעשה מנין תלמוד לומר ושמרתם את משמרת הקדש. הנה נתבאר לך ששמירת המקדש מצות עשה. ושם נאמר גדולה למקדש שיש עליו שומרים ואינו דומה פלטרין שיש עליו שומרים לפלטרין שאין עליו שומרים, וידוע כי פלטרין הוא שם ההיכל אמרו כי גדולת ההיכל ורוממותו הם השומרים המסודרים עליו. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו כלם במסכת תמיד ומדות. (ויקח קרח, הלכות בית הבחירה פרק א'):
That is that He commanded us to guard the Temple and to constantly walk around it, to honor it, to exalt it and to aggrandize it. And that is His saying to Aharon, "while you and your sons under your charge are before the Tent of the Testimony" (Numbers 18:2). And this command has already been repeated with different language, and that is His saying, "and keep the charge of the Tent of Meeting" (Number 18:4). And it is written in the Sifrei (Sifrei Bamidbar 116:1), "'While you and your sons under your charge are before the Tent of the Testimony' - the priests within, and the Levites outside." And in the Mekhilta, they said, "'And keep the charge of the Tent of Meeting' - this tells me only that it is with a positive commandment. From where [do we know that] it is also with a negative commandment? [Hence,] we learn to say, 'And you shall keep the charge of the sanctuary.'" Behold it has been made clear to you that guarding the Temple is a positive commandment. And there it is said, "It is an aggrandizement to the Temple that it has guardians; and a palace that has guardians is not the same as a palace that does not have guardians." And it is well known that, palace, is a name for the [Temple] chamber. They said that the aggrandizement and exaltation of the chamber is [generated by the presence] of the guards that are assigned to it. And the regulations of this commandment have already all been explained in Tractates Tamid and Middot. (See Parashat Korach; Mishneh Torah, The Chosen Temple 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 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 Not binding
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 1QM 2:1-3 The catalog describes this reception as: reorganized
- 4Q400-407 (Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice) read it spiritually
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.156 (general Levitical service; application to guard duty uncertain) rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 7.365-367 (Davidic organization of priestly/Levitical courses) The catalog describes this reception as: reorganized
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 guarding sacred space and personnel restrictions on temple access Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§ 1-21 (purity and access restrictions for temple personnel) Miller, Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts (SBL Writings from the Ancient World, 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.