“ ‘The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and live as foreigners with me.
Not to sell land in Israel permanently
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהָאָרֶץ לֹא תִמָּכֵר לִצְמִתֻת כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ כִּי־גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר שלא למכור בארץ ישראל מכירה קיימת. והוא אמרו והארץ לא תמכר לצמיתות, והתבארו משפטי מצוה זו בערכין. (שם, שם פי"א):
He prohibited - not to sell our land in the Land of Israel [as a] permanent sale. And that is His saying, "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity" (Leviticus 25:23). And the regulations of this commandment have been explained in Arakhin. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee 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 prohibition
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.110-123 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.280-286 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.
- edict of ammisaduqa royal debt-remission (mīšarum) restoring forfeited persons and land/obligations Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§1-22 (esp. provisions on remission/restoration) Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (1984)
- code of hammurabi restrictions on alienating field/orchard tied to feudal (ilkum) service obligations Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§38-41 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.