If you see the donkey of him who hates you fallen down under his burden, don’t leave him. You shall surely help him with it.
To help unload an animal staggering under its burden, even if it belongs to an enemy
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי־תִרְאֶה חֲמוֹר שֹׂנַאֲךָ רֹבֵץ תַּחַת מַשָּׂאוֹ וְחָדַלְתָּ מֵעֲזֹב לוֹ עָזֹב תַּעֲזֹב עִמּוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להוריד המשא מעל הבהמה שנתיגעה במשאה בדרך. והוא אמרו יתעלה עזוב תעזוב עמו. ולשון מכילתא עזוב תעזוב לשון פריקה ושם נאמר וחדלת מעזוב לו עזוב תעזוב נמצינו למדין שהוא עובר על עשה ולא תעשה כלומר שאנחנו נצטוינו לפרוק מעליה משאה והוזהרנו גם כן מהניח אותה רובצת תחת משאה ואם הניחה עבר על עשה ועל לא תעשה. הנה התבאר עזוב תעזוב מצות עשה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפ"ב ממציעא. (ואלה המשפטים, הלכות רוצח פי"ג):
That is that He commanded us to unload the load from upon an animal when it gets tired from its load upon the way. And that is His saying, "you shall surely azov it with him" (Exodus 23:5). And the language of the Mekhilta (Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon Bar Yochai 23:5) is, "'Surely azov' - that is [an expression] of unloading." And there, it is said, "'And you might not want to help him, you shall surely azov' - we find to learn that he transgresses a positive and a negative commandment." This is to say, that we have been commanded to unload the load from upon it, and we have also been prohibited from leaving [the animal] struggling under its load. And if one leaves it, he has transgressed a positive and a negative commandment. Behold it has been made clear that, "you shall surely azov," is a positive commandment. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Chapter 2 of [Bava] Metzia. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 13.)
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 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 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
- Tanḥuma Mishpatim 1 expanded it homiletically
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Mishpatim (Kaspa) 3 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 116-118 rationalized it
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.18-19 The catalog describes this reception as: thematic affinity
Josephus
- Ant. 4.275 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Matthew 5:43-44 expanded it homiletically Love-of-enemies teaching frequently read as developing the enemy-assistance ethic of Exod 23:4-5
- Luke 14:5 The catalog describes this reception as: thematic affinity Sabbath-rescue saying (ox/son fallen into a pit); shares an animal-in-distress motif but addresses Sabbath halakhah rather than the overburdened-animal/enemy logic of Exod 23:5 — connection is loose
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.
- hittite laws liability for an animal in distress (fallen/found), framed as property concern Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §71 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites (1997); Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (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.