his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him the same day; for he who is hanged is accursed of God. Don’t defile your land which Yahweh your God gives you for an inheritance.
To bury the executed person on the same day and not leave the body overnight
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי־קָבוֹר תִּקְבְּרֶנּוּ בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לקבור הרוגי בית דין ביום שנהרגו. והוא אמרו יתעלה כי קבור תקברנו ביום ההוא. ולשון ספרי כי קבור תקברנו מצות עשה והוא הדין בשאר מתים רוצה לומר שנקבור כל מתי ישראל ביום מותם. ולכן המת שאין לו מי שיתעסק בקבורתו נקרא מת מצוה כלומר המת שמצוה על כל אדם לקברו באמרו קבור תקברנו. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בששי מסנהדרין. (תצא שם):
That is that He commanded us to bury those killed by the court on the day that they are killed. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "but you must surely bury him on that day" (Deuteronomy 21:23). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 221:7) is, "'But you must surely bury him' - that is a positive commandment." And the law is the same for the other dead - meaning to say, that we bury all the dead of Israel on the day of their death. And therefore a corpse that has no one to be involved with its burial is called a corpse of commandment (met mitzvah) - meaning a corpse about which it is a commandment upon everyone to bury it, by His saying, "but you must surely bury him." And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the sixth [chapter] of Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei.)
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 flat, unconditional command
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
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
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) LXIV:7-13 The catalog describes this reception as: reinterpreted (hanging as execution; same day burial reaffirmed)
Josephus
- Ant. 4.202 affirmed it
- Jewish War 4.317 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Galatians 3:13 reinterpreted it Paul applies the 'cursed is everyone hanged on a tree' rationale of Deut 21:23 christologically to the crucifixion
- John 19:31 affirmed it removal of bodies before the Sabbath reflects same-day burial concern
- Acts 5:6-10 carried a parallel immediate burial of Ananias and Sapphira; a loose narrative analogue rather than a deliberate legal application of Deut 21:23
The Church Fathers
- Jerome, Commentarii in epistulam ad Galatas, on Gal 3:13 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.
- gilgamesh epic the unburied dead wander as restless spirits (eṭemmu) and find no rest, establishing the Mesopotamian theological premise that proper burial is an urgent obligation owed to the dead Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet XII (George's partial Akkadian translation of the Sumerian 'Bilgames and the Netherworld') George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003)
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.