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.
Not to cultivate the valley where the heifer's neck was broken
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אֲשֶׁר לֹא יֵעָבֵד בּוֹ וְלֹא יִזָּרֵעַ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מעבוד ומזרוע בנחל איתן שנערפה בו העגלה. והוא אמרו אשר לא יעבד בו ולא יזרע, והעובר על לאו זה לוקה. ובמכות (דף כ"ב) כשזכרו מחוייבי מלקות אמרו והא איכא זורע נחל איתן ואזהרתיה מהכא אשר לא יעבד בו ולא יזרע. הנה כבר התבאר שהוא לאו אחד ושהוא במלקות, וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בסוף סוטה. (שופטים, הלכות רוצח פ"י):
He prohibited us from working and planting in the harsh gully in which the calf was beheaded. And that is His saying, "which shall not be worked and which shall not be planted" (Deuteronomy 21:4). And one who transgresses this negative commandment is lashed. And in Makkot (Makkot 22a), when they mentioned those liable for lashes, they said, "But behold, there is [also] planting a harsh gully; and its prohibition is from here - 'which shall not be worked and which shall not be planted!'" Behold it has already been made clear to you that it is [only] one negative commandment, and that it is [punished] with lashes. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained at the end of Sotah. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Murderer and the Preservation of Life 10.)
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.
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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Position not stated
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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.120-123 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.222 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.
- hittite ritual texts Hittite purification ceremonies in which the locus of ritual disposal of impurity is treated as set apart, reflecting a shared concept of taboo geography around sites of ritual contamination Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Hittite elimination/purification rituals (general category; no specific CTH text identified) B. J. Collins, 'Rituals,' in W. W. Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture, vol. 1 (Brill, 1997-2002)
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.