“ ‘You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor show favoritism to the great; but you shall judge your neighbor in righteousness.
A judge shall not show favoritism in judging a case
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תַעֲשׂוּ עָוֶל בַּמִּשְׁפָּט
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו מעשות עול בדין, הוא אמרו יתעלה לא תעשו עול במשפט וענין לאו זה שלא יסתור הגדרים שגדרה תורה לחייב בדבר או לפטור ממנו. (קדושים, הלכות סנהדרין פ"כ):
That He prohibited us from doing inequity in judgement. That is His, may He be exalted, saying, "You shall not commit injustice in judgement" (Leviticus 19:15). And the content of this negative commandment is that one not go against the rules that the Torah established to make [someone] liable for something or to make him exempt from it. (See Parashat Kedoshim; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 20.)
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 prohibition
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 Binding
- 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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifra, Qedoshim 4:3-4 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.55-78 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.216 affirmed it
The New Testament
- James 2:1-9 affirmed it Prohibition of partiality (prosōpolēmpsia) toward rich vs. poor in assembly, echoing the Levitical 'lifting of faces' idiom
- John 7:24 affirmed it 'Judge with righteous judgment' (krinate tēn dikaian krisin) is a thematic resonance with be-tsedeq tishpot rather than a direct citation of Lev 19:15
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:135 carried a parallel
- Q 5:8 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.
- code of hammurabi judge who alters a verdict penalized; judicial integrity Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §5 (a judge who alters his sealed verdict is removed from the bench, fined twelvefold the claim of that suit, and barred from judging again) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- egyptian negative confession self-exculpation regarding fair judgment Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Declaration of Innocence (e.g. 'I have not judged hastily / I have not shown partiality') Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1972)
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.