“ ‘If a man sells a dwelling house in a walled city, then he may redeem it within a whole year after it has been sold. For a full year he shall have the right of redemption.
To follow the prescribed rules for redemption of houses in walled cities
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִישׁ כִּי־יִמְכֹּר בֵּית־מוֹשַׁב עִיר חוֹמָה וְהָיְתָה גְּאֻלָּתוֹ עַד־תֹּם שְׁנַת מִמְכָּרוֹ יָמִים תִּהְיֶה גְאֻלָּתוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שיהיה פדיון לקרקעות הנמכרים תוך חומת המדינה עד תום שנה לבד ואחר השנה יתקיים לקונה ולא יצא ביובל, והוא אמרו יתעלה ויתברך שמו ואיש כי ימכור בית מושב עיר חומה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בערכין ואינה נוהגת אלא בארץ. (בהר סיני, שמטה ויובל פי"ב):
That is that He commanded us that there be [the possibility of] redeeming lands sold within the city wall only until the end of a year. And after [that] year, it remains with the buyer and does not go out in the Jubilee. And that is His, may He be exalted and may His name be blessed, saying, "And if a man sells a dwelling house in a walled city" (Leviticus 25:39). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Arakhin. But it is only practiced in the Land [of Israel]. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee 12.)
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 case law — "if X, then Y"
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- 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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: theoretical only
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 2.117-118 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.282-283 rationalized 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.
- code of hammurabi alienability and exchange of houses and field property Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§39-41 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi redemption of a slave-woman sold under debt-distress (analogy to redemption mechanism, not house property) Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §119 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.