You may charge a foreigner interest; but you shall not your brother interest, that Yahweh your God may bless you in all that you put your hand to, in the land where you go in to possess it.
Not to borrow from a fellow Israelite at interest
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תַשִּׁיךְ לְאָחִיךָ נֶשֶׁךְ כֶּסֶף נֶשֶׁךְ אֹכֶל נֶשֶׁךְ כָּל־דָּבָר אֲשֶׁר יִשָּׁךְ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר הלוה שלא ללוות ברבית, והיה ההיקש שיהיה המלוה עובר כי הוא החוטא והלוה בלתי עובר כי הוא אינו רוצה בחמסו ושיהיה דומה לאונאה שיעבור עושה האונאה לא מי שנעשית לו האונאה, ולכן באה האזהרה גם כן ללוות ברבית והוא אמרו לא תשיך לאחיך, ובא הפירוש לא תנשך. ובבאור אמרו בגמרא מציעא (דף ע"ה:) לוה עובר משום לא תשיך ומשום ולפני עור לא תתן מכשול, כמו שנבאר בזכרנו מצוה זו. (כי תצא, שם):
He prohibited the borrower - that he should not borrow with interest. And the analogy could have been that [only] the lender transgresses, as he is the sinner; whereas the borrower does not transgress, as the does not want his own robbery - such that it would be similar to fraud, that only the one committing fraud would transgress, not the one who is defrauded. Hence the prohibition came also to [specify] borrowing with interest. And that is His saying, "You shall not charge interest to your brother" (Deuteronomy 23:20). And its explanation came: You shall not have interest taken. And in the explanation, they said in the Gemara, Metzia (Bava Metzia 75b), "The borrower transgresses on account of, 'You shall not charge interest; and on account of 'and you shall not put a stumbling block in front of the blind' (Leviticus 19:14)" - as we will explain, when we mention this commandment (Sefer HaMitzvot, Negative Commandments 299). (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, Creditor and Debtor 4.)
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, with modification
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- No clear halakhic ruling on lending at interest is preserved in the Qumran corpus; the topic is not directly legislated in extant sectarian texts The catalog describes this reception as: not attested
Rabbinic aggadah
- Exodus Rabbah 31:13 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.74-78 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.266 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Luke 6:34-35 The catalog describes this reception as: intensified Jesus extends the ideal to lending without expecting return at all, not merely without interest — an intensification of the underlying charitable principle rather than a halakhic ruling on the prohibition
The Church Fathers
- Ambrose, De Tobia 15.51 reinterpreted it
- Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 2.18 read it spiritually
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:275-279 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 regulation of interest rates on grain and silver loans (capping rather than prohibiting) Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§88-91 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of eshnunna fixed interest rates for silver and grain loans Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§18A-21 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- edict of ammisaduqa royal debt-remission cancelling outstanding consumption loans and arrears Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§1-22 (misharum debt-remission provisions) Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (1984); cf. Finkelstein, JCS 15 (1961)
- code of hammurabi Old Babylonian interest-rate regulation for grain and silver loans, treating borrowing at stated rates as a lawful commercial activity; in Deuteronomy 23:20 the borrower too is prohibited from participating in an interest-bearing loan with a fellow Israelite, inverting the Mesopotamian framework where both lending and borrowing at interest are normalized Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§88-91 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- laws of eshnunna Fixed statutory interest rates for silver and grain loans, establishing rate regulation as standard practice and creating no concept of borrower culpability for agreeing to legally sanctioned interest terms Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§18A-21 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.