You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your wine press. As Yahweh your God has blessed you, you shall give to him.
To give gifts generously to a Hebrew bondman when he goes free
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
הַעֲנֵיק תַּעֲנִיק לוֹ מִצֹּאנְךָ וּמִגׇּרְנְךָ וּמִיִּקְבֶךָ אֲשֶׁר בֵּרַכְךָ יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ תִּתֶּן לוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להעניק עבד עברי כשיצא לחפשי ולא יצא בידים ריקניות. והוא אמרו העניק תעניק לו. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפ"ק מקדושין. (ראה אנכי, הלכות עבדים פ"ג):
That is that He commanded us to reward a Hebrew (Jewish) slave when he goes free, and not to have him leave [his owner's domain] empty-handed. And that is His saying, "You shall surely reward him" (Deuteronomy 15:8). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the first chapter of Kiddushin. (See Parashat Re'eh; Mishneh Torah, Slaves 3.)
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.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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, with modification
- Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Kept as an ethical principle
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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 173-174 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.272-273 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.
- code of hammurabi release of a debt-pledged family member after three years of service (freedom restored in the fourth year), with no severance endowment required Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §117 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi inheritance-and-status provision: unacknowledged children of a slave woman do not share the estate, but the slave woman and her children are granted freedom — no reestablishment or severance endowment provided Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §171 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi Old Babylonian debt-slavery law mandating release of a pledged family member after three years, but requiring no severance gifts or productive endowment — the Deuteronomic law (Deut 15:13-14) innovates by requiring livestock, grain, and wine to accompany the release, transforming manumission from bare freedom into economic reestablishment Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §117 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.