“ ‘When a man dedicates his house to be holy to Yahweh, then the priest shall evaluate it, whether it is good or bad. As the priest evaluates it, so it shall stand.
To evaluate houses consecrated by vow for the sanctuary
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִישׁ כִּי־יַקְדִּשׁ אֶת־בֵּיתוֹ קֹדֶשׁ לַיהוָה וְהֶעֱרִיכוֹ הַכֹּהֵן בֵּין טוֹב וּבֵין רָע כַּאֲשֶׁר יַעֲרִיךְ אֹתוֹ הַכֹּהֵן כֵּן יָקוּם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו בערכי בתים, והוא אמרו כי יקדיש את ביתו קדש. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת ערכין. (אם בחקותי, הפלאה הלכות ערכין פ"ה):
That is that He commanded us about house appraisals. And that is His saying, "If anyone consecrates his house to be holy" (Leviticus 27:14). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Arakhin. (See Parashat Bechukotai; Mishneh Torah, Appraisals and Devoted Property 5.)
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 Not binding
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.32-38 (treatment of vows) 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.
- neo babylonian temple archives temple ownership, valuation, and administration of dedicated real property Relationship to the parallel: shared theme documentary corpus (no fixed paragraph numeration; cf. temple property and prebend records) Cf. standard editions/discussions of the Eanna archive; no single canonical paragraph numbering
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.