You shall say before Yahweh your God, “I have put away the holy things out of my house, and also have given them to the Levite, to the foreigner, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all your commandment which you have commanded me. I have not transgressed any of your commandments, neither have I forgotten them.
To recite the declaration when bringing the tithes to the sanctuary
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאָמַרְתָּ לִפְנֵי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בִּעַרְתִּי הַקֹּדֶשׁ מִן־הַבַּיִת
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להתודות לפניו בהוצאת משפטי המעשרות והתרומות ולהתנקות מהם במאמר גם כן כמו שאנחנו נקיים מהחזיק בהם בפועל, וזהו הנקרא ודוי מעשר. והצווי בזה באמרו ואמרת לפני ה' אלהיך בערתי הקדש מן הבית. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה ואיכות הבעור וענינו בפרק אחרון ממסכת מעשר שני. (והיה כי תבא, זרעים הלכות מעשר שני פי"א ):
That is that He commanded us to declare in front of Him the fulfillment of the regulations of the tithes and the priestly tithes; and to be clear from them also in speech, the same way we are clear from holding them back in deed. And that is that which is called the declaration of tithes (vidui maaser). And the command about this is with His saying, "And you shall declare before the Lord, your God, 'I have disposed of the consecrated portion from the house'" (Deuteronomy 26:13). But by Torah law, this too is only practiced in the Land of Israel. And the regulations of this commandment and the nature of the [tithes'] disposal and its content have already been explained in the last chapter of Tractate Maaser Sheni. (See Parashat Ki Tavo; Mishneh Torah, Second Tithes and Fourth Year's Fruit 11.)
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 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 Binding, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.132-144 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.240-243 paraphrased it
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.
- egyptian negative confession formulaic series of self-exculpatory denials recited before a divine tribunal Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Spell 125, 'Declaration of Innocence' Allen, The Book of the Dead or Going Forth by Day (SAOC 37, 1974)
- neo assyrian vassal treaties formulaic series of stipulations structured as first-person loyalty declarations sworn before divine witnesses, paralleling the vidui's oath-before-YHWH form Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty (VTE), §§13-21 (loyalty oath formulary) Parpola and Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (SAA 2, 1988)
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.