You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox fallen down by the way, and hide yourself from them. You shall surely help him to lift them up again.
To help reload an animal that has cast off its load
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
הָקֵם תָּקִים עִמּוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להקים המשא על הבהמה או על האדם כשיהיה לבדו אחר שהורידו זולתנו, שאנחנו כמו שנצטוינו להורידו כן נצטוינו להקימו. והוא אמרו יתעלה הקם תקים עמו. ולשון מכילתא הקם תקים עמו זו טעינה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בשני ממציעא, ושם התבאר שמצוה מן התורה לטעון ומצוה מן התורה לפרוק. (כי תצא, שם):
That is that He commanded us to raise up the load upon an animal or a person when he is alone, after someone besides us has put it down. For just as we have been commanded to unload it, so too have we been commanded to raise it up. And that is His saying, "you shall surely raise it up with him" (Deuteronomy 22:4). And the language of the Mekhilta (Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon Bar Yochai 23:5) is, "'You shall surely raise it up with him' - that is [...] loading." And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the second [chapter] of [Bava] Metzia. And there, it is explained that is a commandment from the Torah to load and it is [also] a commandment from the Torah to unload. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; 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 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 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 96 (humanitas section on beasts of burden) expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.275 paraphrased 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 lost property and straying livestock procedure (no affirmative bystander rescue duty) Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§9-13 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws found/stray animal ownership-claim procedure requiring public declaration rather than affirmative assistance to a neighbor Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §71 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 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.