Commandments · Negative commandments

Not to cultivate a field that has been declared impure due to tzaraat

#243 Negative commandment Leviticus 13:46

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

כָּל־יְמֵי אֲשֶׁר הַנֶּגַע בּוֹ יִטְמָא טָמֵא הוּא בָּדָד יֵשֵׁב מִחוּץ לַמַּחֲנֶה מוֹשָׁבוֹ

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.

  • Requires a standing Temple
  • 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 Not binding
  • Conservative Not binding
  • Reform Not binding
  • Reconstructionist Not binding
  • Karaite Position not stated

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)

  • 4Q274 (Tohorot A) read it more strictly
  • 11QTemple (11Q19) 45-50 read it more strictly

Rabbinic aggadah

  • Leviticus Rabbah (Vayikra Rabbah) 17:4 expanded it homiletically

Philo of Alexandria

  • De Specialibus Legibus 1.80-81 (treatment of leprosy/tzaraat within the priestly purity legislation) read it allegorically

Josephus

  • Antiquities 3.264 rationalized it
  • Contra Apionem 1.229-250 The catalog describes this reception as: polemically rebutted rebuts Manetho's account of the expulsion of polluted persons/'lepers' from Egypt; wholly tangential to the agricultural field prohibition, engaging an Egyptian slander rather than the tzaraat land law

The New Testament

  • Matthew 8:1-4 The catalog describes this reception as: presupposed Jesus' healing and instruction to show oneself to the priest presupposes and affirms the Levitical tzaraat inspection system, though it concerns personal skin-tzaraat rather than the agricultural extrapolation
  • Luke 17:11-19 The catalog describes this reception as: presupposed ten persons with tzaraat required to present to priests, reflecting the isolation-and-inspection framework for afflicted persons, not impure fields

The Church Fathers

  • Origen, Homiliae in Leviticum 8 read it allegorically allegorizes skin-tzaraat of Lev 13-14 generally rather than the agricultural extrapolation 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.

Source & licence

The commentary, cross-references, reception, and modern-conflict analysis in this section are drawn from a public compilation of the 613 commandments, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The cited biblical text is rendered from GEBible’s own public-domain reading corpus. CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab). GEBible’s presentation of this material is offered under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.