“ ‘If any animal of which you may eat dies, he who touches its carcass shall be unclean until the evening.
To observe the impurity laws regarding carcasses of animals
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִי יָמוּת מִן־הַבְּהֵמָה אֲשֶׁר־הִיא לָכֶם לְאָכְלָה הַנֹּגֵעַ בְּנִבְלָתָהּ יִטְמָא עַד־הָעָרֶב
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- 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)
- CD 12:11-15 The catalog describes this reception as: related dietary stringency (peripheral); addresses adjacent dietary purity rules (creatures, fish, locust slaughter) rather than carcass impurity directly
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.119-120 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.259-260 paraphrased it
The New Testament
- Acts 15:20, 29 reinterpreted it the apostolic decree imposes a reduced subset on Gentile believers — abstention from 'what is strangled' (pniktou) and from blood — selectively echoing the neveilah/improper-killing category rather than affirming the full Levitical law
The Church Fathers
- Novatian, De Cibis Iudaicis 3-5 read it allegorically
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 5:3 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.
- hittite ritual texts broad comparative concern with impurity of dead/diseased animals and the unsuitability of found-dead meat for cultic use Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence general (no single section securely parallel) comparative observation; no specific law-collection section reliably parallel
- hittite laws Hittite laws regulate obligations when livestock die, distinguishing between different modes of animal death and prescribing the disposition of carcasses, sharing the concern with proper handling of animal carcasses and the distinction between licit slaughter and animals that have died of natural causes Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§67-70 (livestock loss and death obligations) Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 1997)
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.