It shall be, if the wicked man is worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down and to be beaten before his face, according to his wickedness, by number.
To administer lashes to those convicted of certain transgressions
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהָיָה אִם־בִּן הַכּוֹת הָרָשָׁע וְהִפִּילוֹ הַשֹּׁפֵט וְהִכָּהוּ לְפָנָיו כְּדֵי רִשְׁעָתוֹ בְּמִסְפָּר
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להכות ברצועה את העוברים על מצות מיוחדות, הוא אמרו יתעלה והפילו השופט והכהו. והנה נרמוז בזכרנו מצות לא תעשה על אותן המצות שמתחייב עליהן העוברן מלקות. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו במסכת מכות. (כי תצא, הלכות סנהדרין פט"ז):
That is that He commanded us to give lashes with a whip to those that transgress certain commandments. That is His, may He be exalted, saying, "and the judge shall have him lie down and be given lashes" (Deuteronomy 25:2). And when we mention the negative commandments, we shall [indicate] those that require lashes for those that transgress them. And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Makkot. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 16.)
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.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Not 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
- b. Makkot 23b expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.159-168 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.238 rationalized it
The New Testament
- 2 Corinthians 11:24 carried a parallel Paul reports receiving 'forty lashes minus one' five times from synagogue authorities, attesting the rabbinic thirty-nine-lash practice in the 1st c. CE
- Matthew 10:17 carried a parallel warning that disciples will be flogged in synagogues, reflecting communal disciplinary use
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 24:2 carried a parallel prescribes 100 lashes for fornication; an independent corporal-punishment provision, thematically parallel rather than literarily dependent on the Deuteronomic text
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 judicial flogging for striking a social superior (sixty blows with ox-hide whip), penalty graduated by relative social rank Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §202 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- middle assyrian laws flogging of fixed numerical count (numerical counts of forty/fifty blows specifically in §§40, 44; §18 adds corporal penalty among others) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §§18, 40, 44 Roth, Law Collections 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.
-
Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The commandment obligates courts to administer flogging as a judicially prescribed sanction; UDHR Article 5 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment, and international consensus classifies judicially imposed corporal punishment as degrading treatment.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Even where the substantive goal — deterrence of harmful conduct — is shared with modern penal philosophy, the prescribed method of achieving it through physical pain inflicted on a convicted person's body is incompatible with the post-Enlightenment principle that the state may not use the body as an instrument of punishment.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
Although the commandment explicitly calibrates lashes to the severity of the offense, the selection of corporal punishment as the penal instrument for non-capital violations reflects a punitive model that modern proportionality doctrine rejects: proportionality in contemporary penal theory addresses the quantum of punishment, not only its type, and corporal punishment is categorically excluded regardless of its calibration.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that the power to impose Torah-prescribed lashes lapsed with the dissolution of the ordained Sanhedrin; the commandment is de jure binding in Orthodox enumeration but has been effectively suspended for approximately two millennia.