You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God’s. The case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me, and I will hear it.”
Not to appoint a judge who is not learned in Torah law
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תַכִּירוּ פָנִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט כַּקָּטֹן כַּגָּדֹל תִּשְׁמָעוּן לֹא תָגוּרוּ מִפְּנֵי־אִישׁ כִּי הַמִּשְׁפָּט לֵאלֹהִים הוּא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר בית דין הגדול וראשי ישיבה שלא למנות דיין אדם שאינו חכם בחכמת התורה בעבור מעלות אחרות שיהיו לו וימנו אותו בעבורם, הנה הוא מוזהר מזה, אבל לא תביט התורה במנוי זולת לחריצות האיש בחכמת התורה והיותו יודע צווייה ואזהרותיה והנהגתו וחזקתו במעשים טובים והנאותים לזה, והזהירה ממנות ממונה בעבור מעלות אחרות, והוא אמרו לא תכירו פנים. ולשון ספרי לא תכירו זה הממונה להושיב הדיינין, רוצה לומר שזאת האזהרה אמנם לאיש שימנה הדיינים על ישראל שהוזהר שלא למנותם בעבור מה שהקדמנו, שמא תאמר איש פלוני נאה אושיבנו דיין איש פלוני גבור או יודע בכל לשון אושיבנו דיין נמצא מזכה את החייב ומחייב את הזכאי לא מפני שהוא רשע אלא מפני שאינו בקי לכך אמר לא תכירו. (דברים, שם פי"ג):
He prohibited the Great Court and the head of the yeshiva - not to appoint as a judge, a man who is not learned in the discipline of Torah, on account of other virtues that he has, to appoint him because of them. He is surely prohibited from this. Rather the Torah does not glance in its appointment at anything besides a man's dexterity in the discipline of Torah, his knowing its commands and its prohibitions and his behavior and steadfastness in good deeds that are fitting for this [position]. And it prohibited him from appointing an appointee because of other virtues; and that is His saying, "You must not show any partiality" (Deuteronomy 1:17). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 17:1) is, "'You must not show' - this is [addressed to] one who is appointed to seat judges." [This] means to say that this prohibition is indeed for the man that appoints the judges over Israel - that he is prohibited - that he not appoint them on account of what we said above. "Lest you will say, 'That man is handsome, I will seat him as judge; that man is powerful,' or 'knows all the languages, I will seat him as a judge' - such that he exonerates the guilty and incriminates the innocent. [This is] not because he is evil, but because he is not an expert. Hence He said, 'You must not show.'" (See Parashat Devarim; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 13.)
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 flat, unconditional command
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
- 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 Kept as an ethical principle
- 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)
- CD 10:4-10 affirmed it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifre Deuteronomy §17 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.55-58 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.214-216 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 penalty for a judge who alters his own rendered/sealed verdict: twelvefold fine and permanent removal from the bench; concerns judicial accountability and integrity rather than competence-based appointment qualification Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §5 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 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 direct contradiction.
The commandment requires that judicial appointment be conditioned on mastery of a specific religious legal corpus (Torah law), imposing a religious test for public office that secular liberal democratic systems categorically prohibit; qualification for judicial authority is thereby tied to membership in and competence within a particular religious tradition rather than to secular legal training or professional standards.
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Article 18
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
By making fluency in Torah law the qualifying criterion for judicial appointment, the commandment effectively conditions civic authority on religious identity and knowledge, creating a structural disadvantage for non-adherents that is in substantive tension with the ICCPR's guarantee of freedom of religion and the non-discrimination principle embedded in Articles 18 and 26.