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.
Not to forget what Amalek did to Israel
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.
הזהירנו משכוח מה שעשה לנו זרע עמלק והקדימו להזיק לנו. וכבר בארנו במצוה קפ"ט ממצות עשה לזכור מה שעשה לנו עמלק ולחדש שנאתו, וכן אנחנו מוזהרין מהשליך זה מלבנו ומשכוח אותו. והוא אמרו יתברך לא תשכח. ובספרי זכור בפה לא תשכח בלב כלומר לא תשליך שנאתו ולא תסירנה מנפשך. (כי תצא, הלכות מלכים פ"ה):
He prohibited us from forgetting that which the descendants of Amalek did to us - that they were the first to hurt us. And we have already explained in Commandment 189 of the Positive Commandments, [that we are] to remember what Amalek did to us and to keep fresh our hatred for them. And likewise are we prohibited from flinging this out of our hearts and forgetting it. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "you shall not forget" (Deuteronomy 25:19). And in the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 296:1), it says, "'Remember' - with the mouth. 'Do not forget' - with the heart." [This is] to mean, do not fling away your hatred and do not remove it from your spirit. (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 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
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding (text based)
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 Rabbati 12 (Zakhor) expanded it homiletically
- Tanḥuma Ki Tetze 11 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 11.209-211 The catalog describes this reception as: thematic allusion (Agagite/Haman genealogy)
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 VTE curse language calls for eradication of name and descendant-memory as punishment for disloyalty; the Amalek prohibition against forgetting inverts this structure: Israel must permanently maintain the memory of the enemy's deed, ensuring that the absence of forgetting itself becomes the ongoing act of faithfulness Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary §§56-57 (curse formulae: extirpation of name, seed, and remembrance) 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.
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UDHR Articles 18-19
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The prohibition against forgetting Amalek's deeds mandates the permanent maintenance of a specific adversarial memory as a religious obligation; freedom of conscience and thought protections encompass the right to form, hold, and revise one's own beliefs and attitudes, making legally prescribed collective enmity — even without a coercive enforcement mechanism — a substantive tension with these protections.