For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. They shall not be sold as slaves.
Not to sell a Hebrew bondman by public auction
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי־עֲבָדַי הֵם אֲשֶׁר־הוֹצֵאתִי אֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם לֹא יִמָּכְרוּ מִמְכֶּרֶת עָבֶד
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו שלא למכור עבד עברי כמו שמכרו העבדים הכנעניים בשוה. וזה שיעמידוהו במקום שימכרו שם העבדים ויכריזו עליו ויוסיפו בהן הקונים. לא יעשה זה בשום פנים אלא בהצנע ובדרך נאה. ולשון ספרא לא ימכרו ממכרת עבד שלא יעשה סמטא (* צ"ל סטמתא, והוא סימן וחותם.) ויעמידם על אבן הלקח, וזאת האזהרה כוללת בלא ספק אזהרה לגונב נפש מישראל שימכרהו שהוא ימכרהו בחזקה כמו שהוא עושה על עבד כנעני ויהיה עובר על אמרו יתברך לא ימכרו ממכרת עבד. וכבר קדם לזו זכרון זה, וכבר באר הכתוב שיהרג. ומשפטי מצוה זו עם שלפניה מבוארים בגמרא קדושין פ"א. (בהר, הלכות עבדים פ"א):
That He prohibited us - that we not sell a Hebrew (Jewish) slave exactly in the way that the Canaanite (gentile) slaves are sold. And that is that they would stand them up in a place where they would sell slaves, proclaim them and have buyers bid for them. One may not do this under any circumstances. Rather [one should sell them] privately and in a pleasant way. And the language of the Sifra (Sifra, Behar, Section 6:1) is, "'They shall not be sold as slaves are sold' - that they not be stood up in public and sold on the auction block." And this prohibition, without a doubt, includes a prohibition for one who steals (kidnaps) a Jewish soul - that he would sell him. For he would sell him by force, as he would do with a Canaanite slave; so he would transgress His, may He be blessed, saying, "they shall not be sold as slaves are sold" (Leviticus 25:42). And this was already mentioned earlier (Sefer HaMitzvot, Negative Commandments 243); and Scripture (Exodus 21:16) already explained that he be killed. And the regulations of this commandment, along with the one before it, have already been explained in the Gemara, Kiddushin, Chapter 1. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Slaves 1.)
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Undetermined
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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.122-123 rationalized 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.
- code of hammurabi term-limited debt servitude: a debt-pledged person serves and is released in the fourth year (after three years of service) Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §117 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- ugaritic texts Ugaritic commercial slave-sale documents list persons alongside livestock and goods in formulaic commodity language, illustrating the public-commodification practice that Lev 25:42, on the scholarly reading, refuses for Israelites Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast General reference to Ugaritic commercial slave-sale documents (e.g. PRU III/VI); no single text cited Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 2002); cf. Westbrook, ed., A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law (Brill, 2003) for Ugaritic slave-sale formularies
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.