“If a man strikes his servant or his maid with a rod, and he dies under his hand, the man shall surely be punished.
To execute capital punishment by the sword (beheading) when prescribed
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִי יַכֶּה אִישׁ אֶת עַבְדּוֹ אוֹ אֶת אֲמָתוֹ בַּשֵּׁבֶט וּמֵת תַּחַת יָדוֹ נָקֹם יִנָּקֵם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להרוג את העוברים על קצת המצות בסייף. והוא אמרו יתברך נקם ינקם. והנה נרמוז במצות לא תעשה על המצות שחייבין עליהן התזת הראש בסייף. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת סנהדרין. (ואלה המשפטים, הלכות סנהדרין כל דיני ארבע מיתות ב"ד פי"ד וט"ו):
That is that He commanded us to kill, with a sword, those that transgress certain commandments. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "he must surely be avenged" (Exodus 21:20). And behold, in the negative commandments, we shall [indicate] those which require chopping off the head. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 14, 15.)
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 Not binding
- Conservative Inoperative
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Not 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 3.137-143 (within the homicide/assault section) The catalog describes this reception as: discussed
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.
- hittite laws compensation for killing a slave paid to owner as property loss — no judicial consequence for a master killing his own slave, in contrast to the biblical 'avenging' requirement Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§1-4 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi death of a distrainee (debt-pledge) in a creditor's custody yielding fixed penalties; cited by contrast because CH contains NO provision penalizing a master who kills his own slave — its relevance is the absence of any owner-slave killing rule, not that §§115-116 themselves address that case Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§115-116 Roth, Law Collections 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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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
While capital punishment by sword is applied to murder (a violent offense where proportionality arguments are stronger), it is also the method for the condemned city (*ir ha-niddahat*) — collective execution of an entire city for idolatry — which is disproportionate and constitutes collective punishment prohibited by modern law.
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Article 6 (right to life; capital punishment restricted to most serious crimes)
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
ICCPR Article 6 reflects a normative trend toward abolition of capital punishment; even for murder (the primary offense here), the movement in international human-rights law is toward life imprisonment as the maximum penalty, placing court-imposed capital punishment by any method in substantive tension with the Covenant's trajectory.
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rabbinic tradition; Sanhedrin jurisdiction lapsed post-70 CE
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Capital jurisdiction by the Sanhedrin lapsed with the destruction of the Second Temple; execution by sword (*hereg*) remains a de jure halakhic norm codified by Maimonides (Hilkhot Sanhedrin 14:1) but has not been administered within rabbinic jurisprudence since the end of ordained judicial authority.