“ ‘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.
To judge righteously and with equity
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
בְּצֶדֶק תִּשְׁפֹּט עֲמִיתֶךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצוה לכל הדיינין להשוות בין בעלי דינין ושיהיה נשמע כל אחד מהם עם אורך דבריו או קצורם, והוא אמרו יתעלה בצדק תשפוט עמיתך ובא הפירוש בספרי שלא יהא אחד מדבר כל צרכו ואחד אומר לו קצר דבריך וזו אחת מהכוונות שכולל עליהם הצווי הזה ובא גם כן שכל איש מצווה לדון דין תורה כשיהיה יודע בו הריב שבין בעלי דינים. ובביאור אמרו אחד דן את חבירו דבר תורה שנאמר בצדק תשפוט עמיתך. ובכללה גם כן שיתחייב שידון את חבירו לכף זכות ולא יפרש מעשיו ודבריו אלא לטוב. וכבר נתבארו משפטי מצוה זו במקומות מפוזרים בתלמוד. (קדושים תהיו, סנהדרין פכ"א):
That is that He commanded all judges to equalize the litigants, that each of them be heard - whether his words are long or short. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "with righteousness shall you judge your fellow" (Leviticus 19:15). And the explanation appears in the [Sifra] (Sifra, Kedoshim, Chapter 4:4) - "that one not be allowed to speak at length, and the other told, 'Speak briefly.'" And that is one of the intentions included in the command. And it also comes [to teach] that each person is commanded to judge an argument between two litigants [according to] Torah law, if he knows [the law]. And they said in explanation (Sanhedrin 3a), "By Torah law, one must judge one's fellow - as it is stated, 'with righteousness shall you judge your fellow.'" And also included in it is that one is obligated to judge his fellow favorably and interpret his actions and his words only for the good. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in scattered places in the Talmud. (See Parashat Kedoshim; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 21.)
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
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
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- CD X:4-10 The catalog describes this reception as: application
Rabbinic aggadah
- Devarim Rabbah 5:6 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Spec. Leg. 4.55-78 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.216 affirmed it
The New Testament
- James 2:1-9 affirmed it prohibits partiality (prosōpolēmpsia), specifically favoritism toward the rich/honored — a partial application of Lev 19:15's bidirectional impartiality principle
- John 7:24 affirmed it 'judge with righteous judgment' (krinate tēn dikaian krisin)
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 penalty for a judge who alters his rendered verdict Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §5 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- egyptian negative confession first-person posthumous disavowal of having perverted justice or shown partiality (declaration of innocence, not a judicial statute) Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Declaration of Innocence Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1972)
- egyptian negative confession first-person declarations of not having shown partiality or perverted justice parallel the Levitical impartiality demand, though framed as posthumous self-exculpation before the divine tribunal rather than as a binding legal obligation on living judges Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Ch. 125, Negative Confession (Declaration of Innocence) Faulkner, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, rev. ed. (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.