But the field of the pasture lands of their cities may not be sold, for it is their perpetual possession.
Not to change the boundaries of the Levitical cities' fields
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּשְׂדֵה מִגְרַשׁ עָרֵיהֶם לֹא יִמָּכֵר כִּי־אֲחֻזַּת עוֹלָם הוּא לָהֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו משנות מגרשי הלוים. והוא אמרו ושדה מגרש עריהם וגו', ואתה יודע לשון התורה שינתן ללוים ערים ומגרשים כלומר אלף אמה מגרש ואלפים אמה מהם חוץ לשדות וכרמים כמו שהתבאר בסוטה (דף כ"ז:) ובאה האזהרה ללוים שלא לשנות אלו הגדרים שלא ישיבו העיר מגרש ולא המגרש עיר ולא השדה מגרש ולא המגרש שדה. והוא אמרו לא ימכר ובאה הקבלה שענינו לא ישונה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בעירובין. (בהר, הלכות שמיטה פרק י"ג):
He prohibited us from changing the open places of the Levites. And that is His saying, "And the field of the open place of their cities, etc." (Leviticus 25:34). And you know the language of the Torah - that cities and open places be given to the Levites; meaning to say, a thousand ells [as an] open place, and two thousand ells going out from there for fields and vineyards - as it has been explained in Sotah (Sotah 27b). And the prohibition comes to the Levites not to change these distinctions - that they not make the city, an open place; the open place, a city; the field, an open place; or the open place, a field. And that is His saying, "shall not be sold" - and the tradition comes [to explain that this indicates] that its nature not be changed. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Eruvin. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee 13.)
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.
- 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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Position not stated
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
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 Old Babylonian agricultural land is regulated by tenure and cultivation obligation; the law imposes no statutory bar on administrative reclassification of land, in contrast to the fixed Levitical zoning Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§42-58 (field-tenure, cultivation-obligation, and tenant-negligence laws) 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 direct contradiction.
The commandment prescribes corporal punishment (thirty-nine lashes) for altering zoning designations of Levitical lands — a non-violent regulatory infraction with no victim in the modern legal sense. Post-Enlightenment proportionality doctrine precludes corporal punishment for administrative land-use violations.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Modern penal systems address land-use and zoning violations through civil remedies, fines, and injunctions, not through corporal punishment administered by a criminal tribunal; the malkot sanction is incompatible with the methods of contemporary regulatory law.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; the thirty-nine-lash sanction for a non-violent zoning infraction falls within the category of treatment that international human-rights bodies classify as inhuman or degrading.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that capital and corporal jurisdiction of the Sanhedrin lapsed with the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of ordained judicial authority; malkot for Levitical land-use violations has been inoperative since that point, making the conflict de jure rather than actively enforced.