If the place which Yahweh your God shall choose to put his name is too far from you, then you shall kill of your herd and of your flock, which Yahweh has given you, as I have commanded you; and you may eat within your gates, after all the desire of your soul.
To slaughter animals and birds according to the prescribed method (shechitah)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְזָבַחְתָּ מִבְּקָרְךָ וּמִצֹּאנְךָ אֲשֶׁר נָתַן יְהוָה לְךָ כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוִּיתִךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשחוט בהמה חיה ועוף ואחר יאכל בשרם ושלא יהיה היתר אכילתם אלא בשחיטה. והוא אמרו יתברך וזבחת מבקרך ומצאנך. ולשון ספרי וזבחת מה מוקדשין בשחיטה אף חולין בשחיטה, כאשר צויתיך מלמד שנצטוה משה על הושט ועל הקנה ועל רוב אחד בעוף ועל רוב שנים בבהמה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו ודקדוקיה במסכת חולין. (ראה אנכי, קדושה הלכות שחיטה פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to slaughter a beast, animal or bird and then to eat its meat; and that it only be permissible to eat their meat by slaughtering [it]. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "and you may slaughter any of the cattle or sheep" (Deuteronomy 12:21). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 75) is, "'And you may slaughter' - just as offerings are with slaughtering; so too, mundane animals are with slaughtering. [...] 'As He commanded you' - [this] teaches that Moses was commanded about the gullet and windpipe, and about the [cutting of] the majority of one [of these being the criterion for proper slaughter] in a bird and the majority of both, in a beast." And the regulations of this commandment and its analysis have already been explained in Tractate Chullin. (See Parashat Re'eh; Mishneh Torah, Ritual Slaughter 1.)
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 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 Not binding
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding, with modification
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
- Leviticus Rabbah 27:11 expanded it homiletically The connection is thematic — divine concern and compassion for animals — rather than a procedural exposition of shechitah; treat as an aggadic reflection on slaughter and mercy rather than a halakhic source.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.118-122 rationalized it Philo treats the abstention from blood and the consumption of properly drained meat within his dietary-law rationalization; he does not detail the rabbinic shechitah procedure as such.
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.260 affirmed it Josephus addresses blood and dietary regulation in his summary of Mosaic law; this passage attests to the blood prohibition and proper handling of slaughtered meat generally rather than detailing the specific rabbinic shechitah procedure.
The New Testament
- Acts 15:20 The catalog describes this reception as: partial retention Apostolic decree retains the blood prohibition (abstaining from blood and things strangled, πνικτοῦ) for gentile believers. Later interpreters have read this as presupposing proper slaughter and blood drainage, though the decree itself does not specify the shechitah procedure.
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 5:3 carried a parallel, with divergence
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.