“ ‘If any man has an emission of semen, then he shall bathe all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the evening.
One who becomes ritually impure must immerse in a mikveh
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְרָחַץ בַּמַּיִם אֶת־כָּל־בְּשָׂרוֹ וְטָמֵא עַד־הָעָרֶב
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.
- Recorded as practiced today
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
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding by scriptural derivation
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)
- 4QMMT B 55-58 The catalog describes this reception as: stringent purity halakhah (liquid stream / muṣaqot ruling)
- 1QS 3:4-9 The catalog describes this reception as: moralized/conditioned
- CD 10:10-13 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer 46 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.257-261 read it allegorically
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.205-209 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.262-264 affirmed it
- Jewish War 2.129 carried a parallel
The New Testament
- Hebrews 9:10 treated it as abrogated refers to 'various washings' (baptismois) of the old cult as imposed only 'until the time of reformation' and thereby superseded
- Mark 7:3-4 reinterpreted it describes extra-biblical Pharisaic ablution traditions (paradosis) in a polemical frame, not the Levitical immersion command itself
The Church Fathers
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 14 rejected it polemically
- Tertullian, De Baptismo 5 reinterpreted it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 5:6 carried a parallel
- Q 4:43 carried a parallel
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.
- mesopotamian incantation series ritual ablution for removal of impurity/contamination prior to or during cultic activity, parallel to Israelite immersion remedy Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence bīt rimki ('house of ablution') ritual; cf. Šurpu purification series Læssøe, Studies on the Assyrian Ritual bît rimki (1955); Reiner, Šurpu (AfO Beiheft 11, 1958)
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.