Only he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he may multiply horses; because Yahweh has said to you, “You shall not go back that way again.”
The king shall not acquire an excessive number of horses
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
רַק לֹא־יַרְבֶּה־לּוֹ סוּסִים וְלֹא־יָשִׁיב אֶת־הָעָם מִצְרַיְמָה לְמַעַן הַרְבּוֹת סוּס
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר המלך מהרבות סוסים. והוא אמרו לא ירבה לו סוסים, וגדר זה שלא יהיה לו סוס רץ לפניו ואפילו סוס אחד לא יהיה אצלו אלא הבהמה שירכב עליה לבד או סוסים שישימם באורוות כדי שיהיו מוכנים למלחמה ירכבו הפרשים עליהם אבל לעצמו לא יהיה לו אלא בהמה אחת לבד. והתבארו משפטי מצוה זו בשני מסנהדרין. (שם, שם פ"ג):
He prohibited the king from having many horses. And that is His saying, "he may not have many horses" (Deuteronomy 17:16). And the measure of this is that he should not have a horse to run in front of him. He should not have even one horse with him, besides the animal upon which he rides, and the horses that he places in the stables, in order that they be ready for war - that the riders will mount. But for himself, he should only have one single animal. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the second [chapter] of Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 3.)
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, with modification
- 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)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) LVI-LIX (Law of the King / Torah of the King) read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- b. Sanhedrin 21b expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.157-169 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.223-224 (royal law) rationalized 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 Hammurabi presents himself as divinely appointed warrior-king whose military might is emblematic of royal legitimacy — the accumulation of military power including chariotry is a standard feature of royal self-presentation that the Deuteronomic restriction directly inverts Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Prologue (i 1 – v 24) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- neo assyrian vassal treaties Neo-Assyrian loyalty oaths presuppose and legitimize the suzerain's unlimited military build-up including horse and chariot forces; the Deuteronomic restriction on the king's accumulation of horses inversely constrains what ANE treaty ideology treats as the natural prerogative of sovereign power Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Esarhaddon Succession Treaty (SAA 2 no. 6) and the loyalty-oath corpus generally Parpola and Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (SAA 2, 1988)
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.