then the man shall bring his wife to the priest, and shall bring her offering for her: one tenth of an ephah of barley meal. He shall pour no oil on it, nor put frankincense on it, for it is a meal offering of jealousy, a meal offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to memory.
Not to put oil on the sotah offering
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־יִצֹק עָלָיו שֶׁמֶן וְלֹא־יִתֵּן עָלָיו לְבֹנָה כִּי־מִנְחַת קְנָאֹת הוּא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מבלול מנחת סוטה. והוא אמרו יתעלה ולא יצוק עליה שמן, ואם הקריבה בשמן לוקה. (נשא, נשים הלכות סוטה פ"ג):
He prohibited us from mixing the meal-offering of a sotah (suspected adulteress) [with oil]. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "and he shall not pour oil upon it" (Numbers 5:15). And if one offered it with oil, he is lashed. (See Parashat Nasso; Mishneh Torah, Woman Suspected of Infidelity 3.)
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 ritual instruction
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
- 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 Not binding
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Not 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
- Sifre Numbers, Naso (piskaot on the sotah pericope, ~§§7-21) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.52-62 reinterpreted it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.270-273 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 suspected-adultery provisions: §131 wife accused by husband clears herself by exculpatory oath; §132 wife accused by public rumor (not caught in the act) undergoes the divine River Ordeal Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§131-132 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- middle assyrian laws river ordeal and procedures concerning suspected wifely infidelity Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §17, A §22 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.