If the bull gores a male servant or a female servant, thirty shekels of silver shall be given to their master, and the ox shall be stoned.
To judge the case of injury caused by an animal to a person
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אִם־עֶבֶד יִגַּח הַשּׁוֹר אוֹ אָמָה כֶּסֶף שְׁלֹשִׁים שְׁקָלִים יִתֵּן לַאדֹנָיו וְהַשּׁוֹר יִסָּקֵל
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
- 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, with modification
- Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding, with modification
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.
Josephus
- Ant. 4.281-282 reinterpreted it Josephus paraphrases the goring-ox and animal-damage legislation, recasting it in Greco-Roman juridical terms
The New Testament
- Matthew 26:15 carried a parallel Thirty pieces of silver as betrayal price; indirect thematic linkage to the slave-valuation tariff mediated through Zech 11:12-13 rather than direct citation of Exod 21:32
- Matthew 27:3-10 carried a parallel Matthean fulfillment citation conflating Zechariah and Jeremiah; typological reuse of the thirty-shekel sum
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 fixed payment for slave killed by a known goring ox Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §252 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of eshnunna goring ox killing a slave; owner pays 15 shekels of silver to the slave's master (the parallel free-person provision is §54-55) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §56 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.
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Article 7 (equality before the law without discrimination)
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment prescribes a fixed thirty-shekel payment for the death of a slave gored by an ox, whereas the same ox killing a free person triggers the possibility of the owner's execution or negotiated ransom — a legally codified differential in the value of human life based on status that Article 7's equality guarantee directly contradicts.
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Article 26 (equality before the law and equal protection against discrimination)
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The law assigns a flat commodity-level payment for a slave's death rather than the graduated remedies available for free persons, institutionalizing a two-tier system of legal protection distinguished by enslaved status — incompatible with ICCPR Article 26's guarantee of equal and effective protection without discrimination.