As a servant hired year by year shall he be with him. He shall not rule with harshness over him in your sight.
Not to allow a heathen to oppress a Hebrew bondman
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־יִרְדֶּנּוּ בְּפֶרֶךְ לְעֵינֶיךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר שלא למכור אמה עבריה לזולתנו. והתבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפ"א מקדושין. (משפטים, הלכות עבדים פ"י):
That He prohibited us - that we not sell a Hebrew (Jewish) maidservant to someone besides ourselves. And the regulations of this commandment have been explained in Chapter 1 of Kiddushin. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Slaves 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.
- Binding in the land of Israel
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Position not stated
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 reinterpreted 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 debt-pledge with temporal limitation: a wife, son, or daughter handed over for debt serves three years and is released in the fourth Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §117 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of eshnunna distraint/seizure of a person for debt and liability for mistreatment of a distrainee Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§23-24 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
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.