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.”
A judge shall not fear any person in rendering judgment
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
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.
שהזהיר הדיין שלא לירא מאדם מזיק גוזם ודובר עתק ולא יחתוך עליו הדין והאמת, אבל הוא חייב לחתוך את הדין ולא ישים לב במה שיקרה עליו מן ההיזק מן האיש ההוא. והוא אמרו יתעלה לא תגורו מפני איש. ולשון ספרי לא תגורו שמא תאמר מתירא אני מאיש פלוני שמא יהרגני או שמא ידליק את גדישי או שמא יקצץ את נטיעותי תלמוד לומר לא תגורו מפני איש. (אלה הדברים, שם פכ"ב):
That He prohibited the judge from being afraid of a man who is destructive, injurious and speaks haughtily; such that [the judge] should not incline the verdict towards him. Rather he is obligated to decide the verdict [truthfully] and not pay attention to what will happen to him in terms of injury from this man. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "do not fear any man" (Deuteronomy 1:17). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 17:5) is, "'Do not fear' - lest you say, 'I am afraid of that man, lest he kill me, or lest he burn my stacks or lest he cut down my plants.' [Hence] we learn to say, 'do not fear any man.'" (See Parashat Devarim; Mishneh Torah, The Sanhedrin and the Penalties within their Jurisdiction 23.)
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.
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
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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifre Deuteronomy §17 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.55-78 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.223-224 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:58 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 a judge who alters his own sealed/rendered verdict is fined twelvefold, removed from the bench, and barred from future judicial service — articulating finality of verdict and judicial accountability; thematically distinct from the anti-intimidation concern of Deut 1:17 but broadly related to judicial integrity Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.