“He who sacrifices to any god, except to Yahweh only, shall be utterly destroyed.
Not to wrong a stranger in speech
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְגֵר לֹא־תוֹנֶה וְלֹא תִלְחָצֶנּוּ כִּי־גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מהונות הגר בדברים. והוא אמרו וגר לא תונה. ולשון מכילתא לא תונה בדברים. ונכפלה האזהרה ואמר לא תונה אותו. ובספרא שלא תאמר לו אמש היית עובד ע"ז ועכשיו נכנסת תחת כנפי השכינה. (משפטים, הלכות מכירה פי"ד):
He prohibited us from wronging the convert with words. And that is His stating, "You shall not wrong a convert" (Exodus 22:20). And the prohibition was repeated with His saying, "you shall not wrong him" (Leviticus 19:33). And in the Sifra (Sifra, Kedoshim, Chapter 8:2): "You shall not say to him, 'Yesterday you worshipped idolatry, and now you have entered under the wings of the Divine Presence.'" (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Sales 14.)
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.
- 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 Binding
- 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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Nezikin 18 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.51-53 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.276 The catalog describes this reception as: partial parallel
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.
- instruction of amenemope Amenemope's wisdom instruction counsels against humiliating, taunting, or verbally demeaning the poor and socially powerless, paralleling the Covenant Code's prohibition on verbal wronging of the resident alien Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Ch. 26 (on treatment of the poor and vulnerable) Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II (UC Press, 1976), pp. 146-163
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.