“ ‘You shall take no ransom for him who has fled to his city of refuge, that he may come again to dwell in the land before the death of the priest.
Not to accept a ransom to exempt an accidental killer from exile to a city of refuge
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא־תִקְח֣וּ כֹ֔פֶר לָנ֖וּס אֶל־עִ֣יר מִקְלָט֑וֹ לָשׁוּב֙ לָשֶׁ֣בֶת בָּאָ֔רֶץ עַד־מ֖וֹת הַכֹּהֵֽן
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר מקחת כופר מן ההורג בשוגג כדי שנפטור אותו מגלות אבל יגלה על כל פנים. והוא אמרו לא תקחו כופר לנוס אל עיר מקלטו. והתבארו משפטי מצוה זו במכות. (מסעי, הלכות רוצח פ"א):
He prohibited the taking of ransom from an unintentional killer, so as to exempt him from exile. Rather he must be exiled under any circumstances. And that is His saying, "And you shall not take ransom for him who fled to the city of his refuge" (Numbers 35:32). And the regulations of this commandment have been explained in Makkot. (See Parashat Masei; Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 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 prohibition
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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Bemidbar Rabbah 23:13 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.123-128 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.171-173 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:92 set it in contrast
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 an awilum struck in a brawl and dying of the blow, where the blow was unintentional, settled by payment of one-half mina of silver — monetary composition for an accidental homicide, precisely the kind of settlement the Num 35:32 prohibition forecloses Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §207 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws the killing-in-a-quarrel provisions, with composition payment of persons or silver for homicide in lieu of execution — the standard ANE blood-money framework that the no-ransom rule rejects Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§1-4 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 1997)
- middle assyrian laws homicide settled by surrender of a person or silver at the option of the victim's household — optionality of composition that the Priestly no-ransom rule refuses to permit Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast A §10 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.