Yahweh said to Moses, “This is what you shall tell the children of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.
To construct the altar in its prescribed form
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
מִזְבַּ֣ח אֲדָמָה֮ תַּעֲשֶׂה־לִּי֒
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 Not binding
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) cols. III-XIII read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, on the Altar Law pericope (Exod 20:22-26) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.268-275 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.200-201 reinterpreted it
The New Testament
- Hebrews 13:10 read it spiritually reconfigures the altar Christologically as a heavenly/eschatological reality superseding the physical altar
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homiliae in Exodum read it allegorically
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.