then he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, ‘There seems to me to be some sort of plague in the house.’
To follow the prescribed purification ritual for houses affected by tzaraat
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּבָא אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ הַבַּיִת וְהִגִּיד לַכֹּהֵן לֵאמֹר כְּנֶגַע נִרְאָה לִי בַּבָּיִת
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להיות בית המנוגע טמא, ומצוה זו כוללת טומאת בתים מה מהם צריך הסגר או לנתוץ קצת הכותלים או לנתוץ כולו ובמה יטמאו ואיך יטמאו. (מצורע, הלכות טומאת צרעת פי"ד):
That is that He commanded us that a house that has tsaraat be impure. And this commandment includes [the various] impurities of a house - which ones need quarantine or the destruction of some of its walls or the destruction of all of it, with what they become impure and how they become impure. (See Parashat Metzora; Mishneh Torah, Defilement by Leprosy 14.)
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.
- 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 Position not recorded
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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- b. Sanhedrin 71a The catalog describes this reception as: homiletic theoretical
- Leviticus Rabbah 17:3 expanded it homiletically
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 apotropaic house/structure protection ritual Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence namburbi / house-protection (apotropaic) ritual tradition general reference; Mesopotamian apotropaic and namburbi rituals address evil portents associated with buildings, but no direct textual parallel to a 'diseased house' subjected to a diagnostic-impurity framework exists, so the comparison is thematic rather than textual
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.