but you shall surely open your hand to him, and shall surely lend him sufficient for his need, which he lacks.
To give tzedakah (charity) to the poor and needy
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי־פָתֹחַ תִּפְתַּח אֶת־יָדְךָ לוֹ וְהַעֲבֵט תַּעֲבִיטֶנּוּ דֵּי מַחְסֹרוֹ אֲשֶׁר יֶחְסַר לוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לעשות צדקה ולחזק החלשים ולהרחיב אליהם. וכבר בא הצווי במצוה זו במלות מתחלפות, אמרו יתעלה פתוח תפתח את ידך וגו' אמר והחזקת בו ואמר וחי אחיך עמך, והכוונה באלו הלשונות כולם אחת והוא שנעזור אותם ונחזקם די ספוקם. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו במקומות רבים בכתובות ובבא בתרא, ובאה הקבלה בזו שאפילו עני המתפרנס מן הצדקה חייב במצוה זו כלומר הצדקה אם למי שלמטה ממנו אם לדומה לו ואפילו בדבר מועט. (ראה אנכי, הלכות מתנות עניים פרק ו'):
That is that He commanded us to give charity (tzedekah) and to strengthen the weak and to ease [their situation]. And this command has already appeared with varying words: His, may He be exalted, saying, "you must surely open your hand, etc." (Deuteronomy 15:8); and He said, "you must support him" (Leviticus 25:35); and He said, "and your brother shall live with you" (Leviticus 25:36). But the intention of all these expressions is one; and that is that we help them and support them sufficiently for their requirements. And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in many places in Ketubot and Bava Batra. And the received tradition has appeared about this, that even a poor person living off of charity is obligated in this commandment - meaning charity - whether to someone lower than him or similar to him, and even with something small. (See Parashat Re'eh; Mishneh Torah, Gifts to the Poor 6.)
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
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
- Reform Binding
- Reconstructionist 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)
- CD 14:12-16 affirmed it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 34:1-16 expanded it homiletically
- Deuteronomy Rabbah 4:8 expanded it homiletically
- Bava Batra 10a (aggadic portion on Turnus Rufus) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 82-87 rationalized it
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.71-78 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.266-270 affirmed it
- Contra Apionem 2.211 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Matthew 5:42 reinterpreted it 'Give to the one who asks' radicalizes the open-handed imperative by stripping the loan-with-return reciprocity of Deut 15
- Matthew 6:2-4 reinterpreted it almsgiving (eleēmosynē) interiorized, given in secret
- 2 Corinthians 9:7 reinterpreted it Pauline 'cheerful giver, not under compulsion' stands in explicit tension with the obligatory tzedakah model; contrastive reframing rather than direct dependence
The Church Fathers
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 52 (on almsgiving and care for the poor) read it spiritually
- Cyprian, De Opere et Eleemosynis read it spiritually
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:177 carried a parallel
- Q 9:60 carried a parallel
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 royal claim to protect the weak and oppressed framed as a virtue of the king rather than a legal obligation binding on ordinary citizens Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Prologue (i 1 – v 24) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- instruction of amenemope Egyptian wisdom instruction commending generosity and care for the poor as a personal moral virtue and path to divine favor, without creating legally compelled obligations on ordinary citizens Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Chapters 1-4, 25-26 (Lichtheim vol. II, pp. 146-155, 159-161) Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II (UC Press, 1976), pp. 146-163
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.