The elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and shall break the heifer’s neck there in the valley.
To perform the ritual of breaking the heifer's neck in a case of an unsolved murder
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְעָרְפוּ־שָׁם אֶת־הָעֶגְלָה בַּנָּחַל
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לערוף את העגלה כמצותה כשנמצא חלל בשדה ולא נודע מי הרגו, והוא אמרו יתעלה כי ימצא חלל וגו', וזהו דין עגלה ערופה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפרק אחרון מסוטה. (שופטים ושוטרים, נזיקין הלכות רוצח ושמירת נפש פ"ח):
That is that He commanded us to behead a calf according to its commandment when a corpse is found in the field and it is not known who killed him. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "If you find a corpse, etc." (Deuteronomy 21:1). And this is the law of the beheaded calf. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the last chapter of Sotah. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 8.)
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 ritual instruction
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
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 Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 63:1-8 reinterpreted it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sotah 46a (aggadic exposition of the elders' declaration) expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.222 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Matthew 27:24 carried a parallel Pilate's handwashing draws on the shared ANE/Israelite gesture of disclaiming bloodguilt; not a direct citation of the eglah arufah
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:67-73 carried a parallel Surat al-Baqarah narrates a cow-slaughter ritual triggered by an unsolved murder among the Israelites; a thematic (not legal-formulary) parallel to the eglah arufah of Deut 21:1-9
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.
- hittite laws juridical-compensatory parallel: liability of the nearest locality for a person found dead in open territory, with compensation/responsibility devolving on the settlement (not a ritual parallel proper) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §6 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 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.