then you shall do to him as he had thought to do to his brother. So you shall remove the evil from among you.
False witnesses shall receive the punishment they sought to inflict on the accused
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וַעֲשִׂיתֶם לוֹ כַּאֲשֶׁר זָמַם לַעֲשׂוֹת לְאָחִיו
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שנחייב מן העונש בעדים שהעידו שקר כמו מה שחשבו לעשות בעדותם, והוא אמרו יתברך ועשיתם לו כאשר זמם לעשות לאחיו, וזה דין עדים זוממין, אם העידו לאבד ממון נאבד להם כמותו, ואם העידו במה שיתחייב מיתה נמיתם באותה מיתה, ואם העידו במה שיתחייב מלקות נלקה אותם. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו ומה שיתחדש מהשאלות ואיך יתאמת על העדים שהם זוממין עד שנדון בהם בזה הדין במסכת מכות. (שופטים ושוטרים, הלכות עדות פי"ח):
That is that He commanded us to render witnesses that testify falsely liable for the punishment that they thought to bring about with their testimony. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "And you shall do to him as he schemed to do to his brother" (Deuteronomy 19:19). And this is the law of scheming witnesses: If they testified to cause a loss of money, we make them lose the same as [the accused would have]; if they testified something that would bring a death penalty, we kill them with that death penalty; and if they testify something that would bring lashes, we give them lashes. And the regulations of this commandment - and the issues that have arisen, and how we certify that the witnesses were scheming to the point that we judge them with this law - have already been explained in Tractate Makkot. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Testimony 18.)
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding, with modification
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 9:16-23 read it more strictly
- 11QTa (11Q19) 61:6-12 affirmed it
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.40-54 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.219 (witness-law context) paraphrased it treats false-witness penalty within his broader discussion of witness qualification and law
The New Testament
- Matthew 26:59-60 carried a parallel narrative of false witnesses sought against Jesus, presupposing the prohibition's gravity
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 false accusation of homicide punished with death of the accuser Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §1 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi false accusation (sorcery, capital/property cases) and perjury punished by the penalty at stake against the accuser Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§2-4 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of ur nammu sorcery accusation tested by river ordeal, with the consequence falling on the party shown to be in the wrong Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§13-14 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.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The talion principle prescribes that false witnesses receive exactly the penalty they sought to inflict on the accused — including capital punishment if the false testimony targeted a capital charge; while this achieves a form of symmetry, modern penal theory rejects pure retributive talion as a sentencing principle and specifically prohibits the death penalty for a non-violent act (perjury), however malicious.
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Article 6
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
Where a false witness sought to cause the execution of an innocent person, the commandment prescribes death for the perjurer; ICCPR Article 6 limits capital punishment to 'the most serious crimes' involving intentional killing, and the international human rights consensus increasingly construes this as excluding execution for any non-lethal offense, including attempted judicial murder through perjury.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that the talion penalties for scheming witnesses (edim zomemim) lapsed with the dissolution of the ordained Sanhedrin; the commandment is de jure operative in Orthodox enumeration but has been effectively suspended for approximately two millennia.