“ ‘If you sell anything to your neighbor, or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another.
Not to cheat or wrong another in business transactions
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִי־תִמְכְּרוּ מִמְכָּר לַעֲמִיתֶךָ אוֹ קָנֹה מִיַּד עֲמִיתֶךָ אַל־תּוֹנוּ אִישׁ אֶת־אָחִיו
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מהונות קצתנו את קצתנו בסחורה ובמקח ובממכר. והוא אמרו וכי תמכרו ממכר וגו' אל תונו איש את אחיו. ובספרא אמרו באונאת ממון הכתוב מדבר. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו ברביעי ממציעא. (בהר, הלכות מכירה פי"א):
He prohibited some of us from wronging others of us in trade and in buying and selling. And that is His saying, "When you surely sell, etc., you shall not wrong your brother" (Leviticus 25:14). And in the Sifra (Sifra, Behar, Chapter 4:1), they said, 'The verse is speaking about financial wrong." And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the fourth [chapter] of [Bava] Metzia. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Sales 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 prohibition
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
- A monetary penalty
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
- Restitution (tashlumin)
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 Specialibus Legibus 4.193-194 rationalized it part of Philo's treatment of just weights and measures and equity in transactions (4.193-218)
The New Testament
- 1 Thessalonians 4:6 affirmed it exhortation that no one defraud or wrong (πλεονεκτεῖν) a brother in business matters
- 1 Corinthians 6:8 affirmed it rebuke that believers wrong and defraud one another
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 83:1-6 carried a parallel
- Q 17:35 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 duty of honest accounting between merchant and agent Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§104-105 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- egyptian negative confession denial of having falsified the balance / cheated in measure Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Declaration of Innocence Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (rev. ed., 1985)
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.