You shall not see your brother’s ox or his sheep go astray and hide yourself from them. You shall surely bring them again to your brother.
To restore lost property to its rightful owner
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
הָשֵׁב תְּשִׁיבֵם לְאָחִיךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להשיב האבדה לבעליה. והוא אמרו יתעלה השב תשיבם לאחיך ובבאור אמרו השבת אבדה עשה היא ואמרו גם כן באבדה נמצינו למדין שהוא עובר על עשה ועל לא תעשה. והנה נבאר לא תעשה של אבדה במקומו. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו בשני ממציעא. (ואלה המשפטים, הלכות גזלה פי"א):
That is that He commanded us to return a lost object to its owners. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "you shall surely return it to your brother" (Deuteronomy 22:1). And in the explanation (Bava Metzia 32a), they said, "Returning a lost object is a positive commandment." And they also said about a lost object (Sifrei Devarim 222:2), "We have found to learn that one transgresses a positive and a negative commandment" - and behold we will explain the negative commandment in its place (Sefer HaMitzvot, Negative Commandments 269.) And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in the second [chapter] of [Bava] Metzia. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Robbery and Lost Property 11.)
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 case law — "if X, then Y"
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 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.274 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 recovery of lost/stolen property with witness procedures; approach is evidentiary/adjudicative rather than imposing a moral finder's duty Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§9-13 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws declaration of found property before authorities (§45) and the case of yoking/using found livestock (§71) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§45, 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.