Commandments · Positive commandments

To examine the signs in birds to determine which are permitted for consumption

#245 Positive commandment Deuteronomy 14:11

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

כָּל־צִפּוֹר טְהֹרָה תֹּאכֵלוּ

Literary form: a flat, unconditional command

Applicability

How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.

  • Recorded as practiced today

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
  • Conservative Binding
  • Reform Kept as an ethical principle
  • 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.

Philo of Alexandria

  • De Specialibus Legibus 4.116-118 read it allegorically

Josephus

  • Ant. 3.259ff. affirmed it General summary of the dietary/clean-animal laws; Josephus offers no discrete bird-classification treatment at this locus, and the reference is approximate

The New Testament

  • Mark 7:19 treated it as abrogated Narrative gloss declaring all foods clean; addressed to dietary purity in general rather than to avian classification in particular; the Matthean parallel (Matt 15:17-20) is less explicit
  • Acts 10:11-15 treated it as abrogated Peter's vision of unclean creatures (including birds of the air) with the command not to call common what God has cleansed

The Church Fathers

  • Epistle of Barnabas, Barnabas 10.1-4 read it allegorically
  • Novatian, De Cibis Iudaicis 3 read it spiritually

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.