But in the fourth year all its fruit shall be holy, for giving praise to Yahweh.
To redeem the fourth-year fruit crop and bring its value to Jerusalem
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּבַשָּׁנָה הָרְבִיעִת יִהְיֶה כָּל־פִּרְיוֹ קֹדֶשׁ הִלּוּלִים לַיהוָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להיות נטע רבעי כלו קדש, והוא אמרו יתעלה יהיה כל פריו קדש הלולים לה', ודינו שיעלהו לירושלים ויאכלהו שם בעליו כמו מעשר שני בשוה, ואין לכהנים בו כלום, שנאמר ואיש את קדשיו לו יהיה משך הכתוב כל הקדשים ונתנם לכהן ולא שייר מהן אלא תודה ושלמים ופסח ומעשר בהמה מעשר שני ונטע רבעי שיהיה לבעלים. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו משלם בפרק בתרא ממעשר שני. (קדושים תהיו, הלכות מעשר שני פ"ט):
That is that He commanded us that the sapling of the fourth year be completely holy. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "all its fruit shall be holy for jubilation before the Lord" (Leviticus 19:24). And its law is that one brings it up to Jerusalem and its owners eat it there, exactly like the second tithe. And the priests do not have any [portion] in it, as it is stated (Numbers 5:10), "And every man will have his consecrated things." Scripture drew all of the consecrated things and gave them to the priest. The only [ones] left over from them were the thanks-offering, the peace-offerings, the Pesach-offering, the animal tithe, the second tithe and the fourth year sapling - which are the owners'. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the last chapter of Maaser Sheni. (See Parashat Kedoshim; Mishneh Torah, Second Tithes and Fourth Year's Fruit 9.)
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.
- Recorded as practiced today
- 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
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite 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)
- 4QMMT B 62-64 (fragmentary; topical attribution to fourth-year fruit uncertain and debated) The catalog describes this reception as: fragmentary (attribution uncertain)
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 156-159 read it allegorically
- De Plantatione 117-138 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.227 affirmed 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.
- ugaritic texts The Baal Cycle presents orchard and vineyard fertility as the gift of Baal upon his victory over death; this is a thematic/theological backdrop rather than a legal parallel — the Leviticus 19:24 consecration of fourth-year fruit to YHWH implicitly contests the attribution of tree productivity to a fertility deity by asserting divine ownership and covenantal claim Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast KTU 1.4 (Baal Cycle, Baal builds his palace and bestows grain, wine, and oil) and KTU 1.5-1.6 (Baal vs. Mot, death and resurrection of fertility) Smith and Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, 2 vols (Brill, 1994, 2009)
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.