Therefore it shall be, when Yahweh your God has given you rest from all your enemies all around, in the land which Yahweh your God gives you for an inheritance to possess it, that you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under the sky. You shall not forget.
To blot out the memory of Amalek
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
תִּמְחֶה אֶת־זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להכרית זרע עמלק בלבד משאר זרע עשו זכרים ונקבות קטנים וגדולים. והוא אמרו יתעלה תמחה את זכר עמלק. וכבר קדם לנו שלש מצות נצטוו בני ישראל בכניסתן לארץ, למנות להם מלך ולבנות בית הבחירה ולמחות זרע עמלק. ומלחמה זו היא מלחמת מצוה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפ"א מסוטה. (כי תצא, הלכות מלכים פ"ה):
That is that He commanded us to exclusively cut off the seed of Amalek - males, females, adults and children - from among the rest of the descendants of Esav. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "you shall blot out the memory of Amalek" (Deuteronomy 25:19). And we already mentioned (Sefer HaMitzvot, Positive Commandments 173), "Three commandments were commanded to Israel upon their entrance to the land: To appoint a king over them; to build the [Temple]; and to cut off the seed of Amalek." And this war is a commanded war. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Chapter 1 of Sotah. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 5.)
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.
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 Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Position not stated
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
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, Piska 3 (Zakhor) expanded it homiletically
- Tanḥuma, Ki Tetze 9-11 expanded it homiletically
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, Amalek (Beshallaḥ) expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 6.131-155 expanded it homiletically
- Ant. 3.39-62 The catalog describes this reception as: narrative paraphrase
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.
- neo assyrian vassal treaties annihilation/extirpation of name and seed as treaty curse Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary curse section (approx. §§56-72) Parpola & Watanabe, 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.
-
Article 3
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek is traditionally interpreted as an obligation to physically destroy the Amalekite people (cf. 1 Samuel 15; Maimonides, Hilkhot Melakhim 5:5); UDHR Article 3 affirms the universal right to life, with which the commanded annihilation of an entire ethnic group is directly incompatible.
-
Article 6
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 6's non-derogable protection of the right to life is violated by any obligation to physically eliminate a defined people; the commandment's physical-destruction dimension — enacted by Saul in 1 Samuel 15 and counted by Maimonides as a binding positive duty — is irreconcilable with this protection.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The command targets a people defined partly by their posture toward the God of Israel ('he did not fear God,' Deut 25:18); to the extent Amalekite identity is coded in religious-behavioral terms, the commandment authorizes lethal violence against a group on grounds of irreligion or religious hostility, which post-Enlightenment norms prohibit.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commanded destruction of an identifiable national group as such meets the definitional criteria of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention; the intent to destroy a people 'in whole' on the grounds of their collective identity is precisely what that framework was designed to prohibit.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds the commandment inapplicable because the Amalekite nation can no longer be identified (Mishnah Yadayim 4:4; Maimonides, Hilkhot Melakhim 5:5), and the Sanhedrin's jurisdiction for such warfare has lapsed; the de jure obligation remains textually extant but is universally treated as operationally suspended.