for Yahweh your God walks in the middle of your camp, to deliver you, and to give up your enemies before you. Therefore your camp shall be holy, that he may not see an unclean thing in you, and turn away from you.
To keep a paddle or spade among one's weapons for covering waste
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְיָתֵד תִּהְיֶה לְךָ עַל־אֲזֵנֶךָ וְהָיָה בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ מִחוּץ וְחָפַרְתָּה בָהּ וְשַׁבְתָּ וְכִסִּיתָ אֶת־צֵאָתֶךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שיהא כלי החפירה תלוי עם כלי המלחמה עם כל אחד מאנשי החיל לחפור בו במקום יפנה בו בדרך ההיא המוכנת לזה ויכסה הצואה אחרי צאתו עד שלא תראה הצואה על פני הארץ כלל במחנה המלחמה כמו שאמר בראש הפרשה כי תצא מחנה על אויביך. ולשון מצוה זו ויתד תהיה לך על אזניך. ולשון ספרי אין אזניך אלא מקום זיוניך. (כי תצא, הלכות מלכים פ"ו):
That is that He commanded us that there be a digging tool together with the other tools of war with each one of the men of war; so as to dig with it in the place that he defecates on that path that is designated for this. And he then covers the feces after his defecating, such that the feces not be seen upon the ground at all in the war camp, as He said at the beginning of Parashat Ki Tetzei. And the language of this commandment is, "With azenecha, you shall have a spike" (Deuteronomy 23:14). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 257:3) is, "Azenecha is nothing other than the place of zayanecha (your weapons)." (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and Wars 6.)
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 Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding in principle when applicable
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)
- 1QM 7:6-7 The catalog describes this reception as: expansion
Josephus
- Ant. 4.293-301 affirmed 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.
- hittite instructions palace-guard and escort protocol governing the spatial ordering and disposition of personnel; thematically adjacent to camp-discipline concerns but not itself a latrine/refuse regulation Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence CTH 262 (Instructions for the Royal Bodyguard / MEŠEDI protocol) Güterbock & van den Hout, The Hittite Instruction for the Royal Bodyguard (1991)
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.