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.
Not to build the altar with hewn stones
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִם־מִזְבַּח אֲבָנִים תַּעֲשֶׂה־לִּי לֹא־תִבְנֶה אֶתְהֶן גָּזִית כִּי חַרְבְּךָ הֵנַפְתָּ עָלֶיהָ וַתְּחַלְלֶהָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו מבנות מזבח מאבנים שנגע בהן ברזל. והוא אמרו יתעלה לא תבנה אתהן גזית כי חרבך הנפת עליה ותחללה, ואם בנה מהן מזבח פסול ולא יקריבו עליו. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בשלישי ממדות. (וישמע יתרו, הלכות בית הבחירה פ"א):
That He prohibited us from building an altar of stones that have been touched by iron. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "do not build them hewn; for if you lift your sword upon it, you profane it" (Exodus 20:22). And if one did build an altar from them, it is disqualified and he may not sacrifice upon it. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the third [chapter] of Middot. (See Parashat Yitro; 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 case law — "if X, then Y"
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
- 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 Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: non operative
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, Bachodesh (Yitro) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.274-275 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.200-201 affirmed it
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.
- enuma elish The gods construct Esagila, Marduk's great temple in Babylon, using dressed and elaborately worked materials — the paradigmatic ANE model of monumental dressed-stone sacred construction against which Israel's prohibition on hewn stones for the altar stands as a deliberate alternative. Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Tablet VI, lines 50-68 (construction of Esagila from worked/dressed materials) Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 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.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The commandment prescribes flogging (malkot) for constructing the Temple altar with dressed (hewn) stone, a material-specification violation; modern penal frameworks recognize no legitimate basis for corporal punishment for non-violent technical infractions of religious architectural codes.
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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 the use of dressed stone in altar construction 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 technical violations of religious building specifications; the malkot sanction for using hewn stone on the Temple altar exceeds any proportionate response recognized 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.