When you build a new house, then you shall make a railing around your roof, so that you don’t bring blood on your house if anyone falls from there.
To build a parapet (safety fence) around the roof of one's house
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי תִבְנֶה בַּיִת חָדָשׁ וְעָשִׂיתָ מַעֲקֶה לְגַגֶּךָ וְלֹא תָשִׂים דָּמִים בְּבֵיתֶךָ כִּי יִפֹּל הַנֹּפֵל מִמֶּנּוּ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להסיר המכשולים והסכנות מכל מושבותינו, וזה שנבנה כותל סביב הגג וסביב הבורות והשיחין והדומה להם כדי שלא יפול המסתכן מהם או בהם, וכן כל המקומות המסוכנין והרעועים כלם יבנו על סדר שיסור הרעוע והסכנה, והוא אמרו יתעלה ועשית מעקה לגגך. ולשון ספרי ועשית זו מצות עשה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בבבא קמא. (כי תצא, הלכות רוצח פי"א):
That is that He commanded us to remove obstacles and dangers from all of our inhabitations. And that is that we build a wall around the roof, the pits, the ditches and that which is similar to them - so that the one in danger will not fall over them or into them. And likewise all dangerous and rickety places should all be built up properly to remove the ricketiness and the danger. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "you shall make a parapet for your roof" (Deuteronomy 22:8). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 229:6) is, "'And you shall make' - that is a positive commandment." And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Bava Kamma. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 11.)
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.
- 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)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 65:5-7 affirmed it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifre Deuteronomy §229 The catalog describes this reception as: expansive
Josephus
- Ant. 4.283 affirmed 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 builder liability for fatal construction defect (reactive penalty, incl. vicarious death of builder's son) Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§229-233 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of eshnunna owner liability for death caused by a collapsing wall about which the owner had been warned Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §58 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.