“You shall not murder.
Not to commit murder
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא תִּרְצָח
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר הדיין שלא להרוג נקי וזכאי. והוא אמרו לא תרצח. (יתרו, הלכות רוצח פ"א):
That He prohibited the judge - not to kill someone clean and innocent. And that is His saying, "You shall not murder" (Exodus 20:15). (See Parashat Yitro; 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.
- 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
- Death by the sword (hereg)
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 Binding
- Reconstructionist 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- CD 9:1 The catalog describes this reception as: applied to capital jurisdiction and the prohibition of delivering a fellow Israelite to death by gentile law (rather than a generic reinterpretation of lo tirtzach)
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 34:14 expanded it homiletically
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Bahodesh 8 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Decalogo 168-171 rationalized it
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.83-91 read it more strictly
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.91-92 affirmed it
- Against Apion 2.215 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Matthew 5:21-22 read it more strictly Sermon on the Mount extends the prohibition to anger and verbal abuse
- Mark 10:19 affirmed it cited among the commandments to the rich young man
- Romans 13:9 affirmed it subsumed under love of neighbor
- James 2:11 affirmed it
The Church Fathers
- Augustine, De Civitate Dei 1.20-21 reinterpreted it
- Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 2.18 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 5:32 carried a parallel
- Q 17:33 carried a parallel
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 homicide and lethal-assault penalties graded by victim's social class and circumstance Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §153 (conspiracy to murder a spouse); §§206-214 (assault resulting in death, graded by victim's class) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws homicide compensation graded by status and intent Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§1-6 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of ur nammu capital punishment for homicide Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §1 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- egyptian negative confession declarative disavowal of homicide before the divine tribunal Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Declarations of Innocence ('I have not killed') Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1972)
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.