It shall be, when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write himself a copy of this law in a book, out of that which is before the Levitical priests.
The king shall write a second Torah scroll for himself
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהָיָה כְשִׁבְתּוֹ עַל כִּסֵּא מַמְלַכְתּוֹ וְכָתַב לוֹ אֶת־מִשְׁנֵה הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת עַל־סֵפֶר מִלִּפְנֵי הַכֹּהֲנִים הַלְוִיִּם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שיהיה כל מלך מאומתנו יושב בכסא המלוכה כותב ספר תורה לו לעצמו לא יפרד ממנו. והוא אמרו והיה כשבתו על כסא ממלכתו וכתב לו את משנה התורה הזאת. וכבר התבאר כלל משפטי מצוה זו בפרק ב' מסנהדרין. (שופטים ושוטרים, אהבה הלכות תפילין ומזוזה וס"ת פרק ז'):
And that is that He commanded us that any king from our nation that sits on the royal throne should write a Torah scroll for himself, and that it not be separated from him. And that is His saying, "When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Torah written for him" (Deuteronomy 17:18). And all of the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Chapter 2 of Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll 7.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: an exhortation
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
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Not 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)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) cols. LVI–LIX (Law of the King / serekh ha-melekh) read it more strictly
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.157–169 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.223–224 expanded it homiletically
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.
- code of hammurabi king as divinely chosen source/promulgator of justice Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Prologue and Epilogue Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi Hammurabi presents himself as the divinely appointed source of law whose code is inscribed on a public stele — the inverse of the Deuteronomic model where the king is subject to a prior written Torah he must personally copy and study daily Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Prologue (i 1 – v 24) and Epilogue (xlvii 1 – xlviii 19) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 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.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment presupposes a Jewish monarchical state in which the sovereign's legitimacy derives from submission to a divinely authored legal code (Torah) supervised by Levitical priests, rather than from popular consent or a secular constitution. This model of theocratic constitutional monarchy — where Torah functions as the binding law of the realm — stands in substantive tension with the secular liberal-democratic principle that state authority is grounded in popular sovereignty, not in divine mandate, and that no religious text may serve as the supreme law of a pluralist polity.