If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree,
To hang the body of one executed for blasphemy or idolatry
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִי־יִהְיֶה בְאִישׁ חֵטְא מִשְׁפַּט־מָוֶת וְהוּמָת וְתָלִיתָ אֹתוֹ עַל־עֵץ (Deut 21:22, partial)
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לתלות קצת הרוגי בית דין. והוא אמרו יתברך ותלית אותו על עץ. והנה נזכיר המצוה שחייבין העוברים עליה תליה במצות לא תעשה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפרק שביעי מסנהדרין. (תצא, הלכות סנהדרין שם):
That is that He commanded us to hang some of those killed by the court. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "and you shall hang him from a tree" (Deuteronomy 21:22). And behold, in the negative commandments, we shall [indicate] those commandments that one who transgresses them requires hanging. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the seventh chapter of Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 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.
- Binding in the land of Israel
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 Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Position not stated
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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) 64:6-13 reinterpreted it
- 4Q169 (4QpNah) 3-4 i 7-8 reinterpreted it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sanhedrin 46b The catalog describes this reception as: halakhic exegetical
- Genesis Rabbah 88:6 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.202 affirmed it reflects the requirement to bury the displayed corpse before sunset on the same day
The New Testament
- Galatians 3:13 reinterpreted it Paul applies 'cursed is everyone hung on a tree' to the crucifixion of Jesus as vicarious curse-bearing
- Acts 5:30 reinterpreted it 'hanging on a tree' (kremasantes epi xylou) as designation of Jesus' execution
- Acts 10:39 reinterpreted it
- 1 Peter 2:24 reinterpreted it 'bore our sins in his body on the tree'
The Church Fathers
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 89-90, 96 reinterpreted it
- Tertullian, Adversus Judaeos 10 reinterpreted 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 one who breaks into a house is put to death at the site of the breach — a death penalty tied spatially to the crime location, thematically (and only loosely) related to the Deuteronomic concern with the public locus of execution, but lacking any post-mortem display on a pole/tree Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §21 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi a wife who arranges her husband's killing for another man is impaled — impalement as a Mesopotamian method of execution; relevant to Deuteronomy only as background for bodily suspension/exposure practices, but it is the mode of execution itself rather than post-mortem display and lacks the same-day burial limit Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §153 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.