You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.
Not to make a covenant with the seven Canaanite nations
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תִכְרֹת לָהֶם וְלֵאלֹהֵיהֶם בְּרִית
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מכרות ברית עם הכופרים ולהבטיחם על כפירתם, רוצה לומר עם שבעה עממין. והוא אמרו יתעלה לא תכרות להם ברית. וכבר בארנו במצות עשה קפ"ז שמלחמת שבעה עממין וכל מה שבא בהם ראוי למנותו ושהוא לא ילך דרך מצות שאין נוהגות לדורות. (ואתחנן, שם פ"י):
He prohibited us from making a covenant with the heretics - meaning, with the seven nations (of Canaan) - and to allow them to be secure. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "and you shall not make a covenant with them" (Deuteronomy 7:2). And we have already explained in Positive Commandment 187 that war with the seven nations, and everything that comes with them, is appropriate to list [as a commandment]; and that it is not in the way of the commandments that are not practiced for [all] generations. (See Parashat Vaetchanan; Mishneh Torah, Foreign Worship and Customs of the Nations 10.)
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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Binding in principle
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
- b. Yevamot 78b-79a (aggadic treatment of the Gibeonites and Joshua 9) expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4 (Moses' farewell discourse) reinterpreted it Within Moses' farewell discourse, Josephus paraphrases the injunction to separation from the Canaanite peoples and their cult, tending to recast the covenant ban as a moral-religious warning rather than a treaty-law prohibition
The New Testament
- 2 Corinthians 6:14-16 read it spiritually Pauline 'be not unequally yoked with unbelievers... what concord hath Christ with Belial' generalizes the separationist principle from Canaanite treaty to believer/unbeliever association
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.
- sefire treaties treaty with invocation of divine witnesses, mutual obligations, and curse formulae Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Sefire I, Face A Fitzmyer, The Aramaic Inscriptions of Sefire, 2nd ed. (1995)
- neo assyrian vassal treaties suzerainty treaty sealed by invocation of the gods of both parties Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast SAA 2 no. 6 (seal/preamble and divine-witness god-list) Parpola & Watanabe, SAA 2 (1988)
- hittite vassal treaties suzerainty treaty structure in which both parties' gods serve as witnesses and guarantors, precisely the covenantal instrument the Israelite-Canaanite covenant ban rejects Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Preamble and divine-witness sections of Late Bronze Age Hittite suzerainty treaties Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999)
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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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment prohibits entering into any diplomatic or binding agreement with adherents of other religions on the grounds that their religious system is incompatible with Israel's covenant; post-Enlightenment norms of religious pluralism hold that adherents of other religions are entitled to equal legal and diplomatic standing regardless of their theological positions.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment frames diplomatic relations as religiously contingent — covenants with non-YHWH worshippers are categorically prohibited because the treaty form inherently involves acknowledgment of the other party's gods. This theocratic understanding of international relations is incompatible with secular-democratic frameworks that treat diplomatic recognition as independent of religious affiliation.