“If a man opens a pit, or if a man digs a pit and doesn’t cover it, and a bull or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make it good. He shall give money to its owner, and the dead animal shall be his.
To judge cases of damage caused by an open pit
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִי־יִפְתַּח אִישׁ בּוֹר אוֹ כִּי־יִכְרֶה אִישׁ בֹּר וְלֹא יְכַסֶּנּוּ וְנָפַל־שָׁמָּה שּׁוֹר אוֹ חֲמוֹר׃ בַּעַל הַבּוֹר יְשַׁלֵּם כֶּסֶף יָשִׁיב לִבְעָלָיו וְהַמֵּת יִהְיֶה־לּוֹ׃
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לדון בדיני השור. והוא אמרו יתעלה וכי יגח שור וכי יגוף שור. וכבר התבאר דין זה בששה פרקים הראשונים מקמא. (ואלה המשפטים, נזקי ממון פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to administer the laws of the ox [that causes damage]. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "And when an ox gores" (Exodus 21:28); and "And when an ox injures" (Exodus 21:35). And this law has already been explained in the first six chapters of [Bava] Kamma. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Damages to Property 1.)
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.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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, with modification
- Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding in principle
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 Spec. Leg. 3.147-150 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.283-284 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 liability for hazardous conditions created by one's activity (collapsing house); structurally analogous to pit-liability as a strict-liability principle for creator of danger Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§229-233 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.