You shall not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, nor take a widow’s clothing in pledge;
Not to pervert justice against a stranger or orphan
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא תַטֶּה מִשְׁפַּט גֵּר יָתוֹם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהיר השופט מהטות משפט הגרים והיתומים. והוא אמרו יתעלה לא תטה משפט גר יתום. והנה כבר התבאר שמי שיטה משפט אחד מישראל עובר בלאו אחד. והוא אמרו לא תעשה עול במשפט. ואם הטה משפט גר עובר בשני לאוין ואם היה גר יתום עובר בשלשה לאוין. (תצא, שם פ"כ):
That He prohibited the judge from slanting the judgement of converts and orphans. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "You shall not slant the judgment of a stranger and an orphan" (Deuteronomy 24:17). And behold it has already been explained that one who slants the judgment of an Israelite transgresses a negative commandment; and that is His saying, "You shall not commit injustice in judgement" (Leviticus 19:15). So if he slanted the judgment of a convert, he transgresses two negative commandments. And if he was a convert and an orphan, he transgresses three negative statements. (See Parashat Ki Teitzeh; 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.176-178 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.226 affirmed it
The New Testament
- James 1:27 affirmed it defines pure religion as caring for orphans and widows in their affliction, echoing the marginalized triad
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:135 carried a parallel
- Q 2:83 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 royal justice for the weak; protection of widow and orphan Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Prologue and Epilogue (framing material) Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi Hammurabi declares the gods appointed him to protect the weak, widow, and orphan, paralleling Deuteronomy's judicial-protection mandate for the marginalized triad, though without systematic legal protection for resident aliens as a statutory category Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Prologue (i 1 – v 24) and Epilogue (xlvii 1 – xlviii 100) 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.