“Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘When you come into the land which I give you, then the land shall keep a Sabbath to Yahweh.
To let the land lie fallow in the sabbatical year and release its produce
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי תָבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי נֹתֵן לָכֶם וְשָׁבְתָה הָאָרֶץ שַׁבָּת לַיהוָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשבות מעבודת הארץ בשנה שביעית, והוא אמרו יתעלה בחריש ובקציר תשבות. וכבר נכפל זה הצווי פעמים ואמר שבת שבתון יהיה לארץ. וכבר קדם לנו (מצוה צ') האי שבתון עשה ואמר גם כן ושבתה הארץ. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו גם כן בשביעית. ואין חובתה מן התורה אלא בארץ ישראל. (כי תשא, זרעים הלכות שמטה ויובל פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to rest from any agricultural work on the seventh year. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "you must cease plowing and harvesting" (Exodus 34:21). And this command has already been repeated several times: He said, "[But] in the seventh year, the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest (shabbaton)" (Leviticus 25:4) - and we have already seen (Sefer HaMitzvot, Positive Commandments 90) that this, "shabbaton," is a positive commandment. And He also said, "and the land shall rest" (Leviticus 25:2). And the regulations of this commandment are also already explained in Tractate Sheviit. But its obligation by Torah law is only in the Land of Israel. (See Parashat Ki Tissa; Mishneh Torah, Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee 1.)
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.
- 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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding with divergent reckoning
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)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) cols. on sabbatical/jubilee reckoning affirmed it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 1:1 (aggadah on shemittah-keepers as 'gibborei koach,' citing Ps 103:20) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.86-109 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.280-286 affirmed it
- Antiquities 14.202 affirmed it
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.