“Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them, ‘When a man consecrates a person to Yahweh in a vow, according to your valuation,
To evaluate persons who make vows of their own worth to the sanctuary
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אִישׁ כִּי יַפְלִא נֶדֶר בְּעֶרְכְּךָ נְפָשֹׁת לַיהוָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לדון בדין ערכי אדם. והוא מי שיאמר ערכי עלי או ערך פלוני עלי אם היה זכר יפרע כך וכך, ואם היא נקבה תפרע כך וכך, לפי השנים כמו שבא בכתוב ולפי ענין המעריך, והוא אמרו בערכך נפשות. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת ערכין. (אם בחקותי, הפלאה הלכות ערכין וחרמין פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to administer the law of human appraisals. And that is one who says, "My appraisal is upon me," or "The appraisal of x is upon me": If he is a male, he pays such and such; but if she is a female, he pays such and such - according to the age - as appears in Scripture; and according to the condition of the appraiser (the financial situation of the one who makes this declaration). And that is His saying, "the appraisal of souls" (Leviticus 27:2). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Arakhin. (See Parashat Bechukotai; Mishneh Torah, Appraisals and Devoted Property 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 case law — "if X, then Y"
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Requires a standing Temple
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 As the catalog records it: binding in principle suspended
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Position not stated
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
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.