“The garment also that the plague of leprosy is in, whether it is a woolen garment, or a linen garment;
To follow the prescribed purification ritual for garments affected by tzaraat
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהַבֶּגֶד כִּי־יִהְיֶה בוֹ נֶגַע צָרָעַת בְּבֶגֶד צֶמֶר אוֹ בְּבֶגֶד פִּשְׁתִּים
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להיות דנין בטומאת בגד מצורע שיהיה טמא. ומצוה זו כוללת כל מיני טומאת בגדים בצרעת איך הם טמאים ואיך הם מטמאים ומה הם צריכים הסגר או קריעה או שריפה או רחיצה וטהרה וזולת זה שבא בכתוב ומה שבא בו בקבלה. (אשה כי תזריע, טהרה הלכות טומאת צרעת פי"ב):
That is that He commanded us to administer the laws of the impurity of a garment that has tsaraat, such that it be impure. And this commandment includes all the types of impurity of tsaraat of a garment - how they are impure and how they generate impurity, which ones need quarantine or tearing or burning or washing and purification - and the other things that appear in Scripture or through the tradition about it. (See Parashat Tazria; Mishneh Torah, Defilement by Leprosy 12.)
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.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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 Inoperative
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Binding in 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.
Josephus
- Ant. 3.264 rationalized it
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.