Every earthen vessel into which any of them falls and all that is in it shall be unclean. You shall break it.
Any object or vessel that becomes ritually impure shall be treated according to prescribed laws
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכָל־כְּלִי־חֶרֶשׂ אֲשֶׁר־יִפֹּל מֵהֶם אֶל־תּוֹכוֹ כֹּל אֲשֶׁר בְּתוֹכוֹ יִטְמָא וְאֹתוֹ תִשְׁבֹּרוּ
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 Binding, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Binding
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)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 49-50 read it more strictly Treats corpse-impurity within a house and its transmission to vessels and contents, the closest extant parallel to the vessel-impurity logic rather than a direct treatment of Lev 11:33's swarming-creature rule
- 4QMMT B 55-58 read it more strictly Addresses the nitzoq (poured-liquid stream) as a conductor of impurity between vessels, a sectarian stringency bearing on vessel-and-liquid impurity logic rather than directly on Lev 11:33
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261-262 rationalized it Rationalizes the Levitical purity regulations broadly (corpse-contact, childbirth, disease), not the vessel-impurity rule of Lev 11:33 specifically
The New Testament
- Mark 7:1-5 described it Synoptic passage describing the washing of vessels (cups, pots, bronze kettles) and framing the regimen as 'tradition of the elders'; the polemical rejection follows in vv. 6-23
- Matthew 23:25-26 read it spiritually cleansing the inside/outside of cup and dish turned into moral allegory, echoing the interior/exterior debate of Kelim 25
The Church Fathers
- Barnabas, Epistle of Barnabas 10 read it allegorically Allegorizes the dietary legislation of Lev 11 (clean/unclean animals) rather than the vessel-impurity rule specifically
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.