If a poor man, one of your brothers, is with you within any of your gates in your land which Yahweh your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from your poor brother;
Not to harden one's heart or shut one's hand against giving to the poor
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא תְאַמֵּץ אֶת־לְבָבְךָ וְלֹא תִקְפֹּץ אֶת־יָדְךָ מֵאָחִיךָ הָאֶבְיוֹן
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו שלא למנוע צדקה והרחבה מאחינו מהאביונים אשר נדע עניים ויכלתנו להחזיק להם. והוא אמרו לא תאמץ את לבבך, וזה אזהרה מלקנות מדת הכילות ואכזריות. (שם, הלכות מתנות עניים פ"ט):
He prohibited us from refraining to give charity and comfort to our poor brothers, about whose poverty we are aware and whom we have the ability to support. And that is His saying, "do not harden your heart" (Deuteronomy 15:7). And this is a prohibition about acquiring the trait of stinginess and cruelty. (See Parashat Re'eh; Mishneh Torah, Gifts to the Poor 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 prohibition
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- 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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 34:1 expanded it homiletically
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 10 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 82-87 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.266-267 affirmed it
The New Testament
- 1 John 3:17 carried a parallel Whoever has worldly goods and closes his compassion (kleisē ta splanchna) against a needy brother — conceptual echo of the closed-hand/closed-heart motif of Deut 15:7
- 2 Corinthians 9:7 carried a parallel Pauline emphasis on cheerful, non-grudging giving is a thematic/conceptual development of the interior-disposition concern of the prohibition rather than a direct citation
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 107:1-7 carried a parallel
- Q 2:267 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 self-presentation as protector of the weak, framing care for the poor as a mark of royal virtue rather than a standing legal disposition required of every citizen Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Prologue and Epilogue Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- instruction of amenemope wisdom exhortation to maintain an open and generous disposition toward the poor as a mark of personal piety, without imposing a legally prohibited disposition (the hardened heart) on the citizen Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Exhortations on treatment of the poor and honest dealing (esp. chs. 26-28; Lichtheim vol. II, pp. 146-163) 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.