You shall not remove your neighbor’s landmark, which they of old time have set, in your inheritance which you shall inherit, in the land that Yahweh your God gives you to possess.
Not to move a neighbor's boundary marker
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא תַסִּיג גְּבוּל רֵעֲךָ אֲשֶׁר גָּבְלוּ רִאשֹׁנִים בְּנַחֲלָתְךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו שלא לגנוב תחום הארץ. והוא שנשנה תחום וגבול שיהיה בינינו ובין זולתנו עד שיהיה אפשר למשקר שיאמר שקרקע זולתו הוא שלו, והוא אמרו (ספרי) והלא כבר נאמר לא תגזול ומה תלמוד לומר לא תסיג מלמד שכל העוקר תחומו של חבירו עובר שני לאוין יכול אף בחוצה לארץ תלמוד לומר בנחלתך אשר תנחל בארץ ללמד שבארץ עובר בשני לאוין ובחוץ לארץ אינו עובר אלא משום לא תגזול, הנה התבאר שלאו זה מיוחד בארץ ישראל. (שופטים, שם):
He prohibited us - that we not steal the boundary of the land. And that is that we change the boundary and the border that is between us and others, such that it would be possible for a lier to say that the land that is someone else's is his. And that is His saying, ["Do not move back the boundary of your neighbor" (Deuteronomy 19:14). And in the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 188:1-2), they said,] "Is it not already stated (Leviticus 19:13), 'you shall not rob?' What do we learn to say [with], 'Do not move back?' It teaches that one who removes his fellow's boundary transgresses two negative commandments. Perhaps [the same holds true] also outside of the Land [of Israel]? [Hence] we learn to say, 'in your inheritance that you shall inherit in the land' - to teach that in the Land, one transgresses two negative commandments; but outside the Land, he only transgresses on account of one." Behold it has been made clear that this commandment is specific to the Land of Israel. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Theft 10.)
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
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
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 4.149-150 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.225 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.
- instruction of amenemope wisdom prohibition against moving field boundary markers and encroaching on the land of the vulnerable Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Chapter 6 (cols. VII-VIII) Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2 (1976)
- egyptian negative confession denial of encroaching on cultivated land / moving field boundaries Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Declaration of innocence ('I have not encroached upon fields') within Spell 125 Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1972)
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.