“Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘When anyone of you offers an offering to Yahweh, you shall offer your offering of the livestock, from the herd and from the flock.
The priests shall offer sacrifices according to the prescribed procedures
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אָדָם כִּי־יַקְרִיב מִכֶּם קָרְבָּן לַיהוָה מִן־הַבְּהֵמָה מִן־הַבָּקָר וּמִן־הַצֹּאן תַּקְרִיבוּ אֶת־קָרְבַּנְכֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו במעשה קרבן העולה, והוא כשיהיה כל קרבן עולה שיהיה קרב יהיה קרבן יחיד או צבור שיהיה על תנאי כך וכך ועל תואר כך, והוא אמרו אדם כי יקריב מכם אם עולה קרבנו וגו'. (ויקרא, מעשה קרבנות פ"ז):
That is that He commanded us with the process of the burnt-offering sacrifice. And that is that every burnt-offering sacrifice - whether it be the sacrifice of an individual or of the community - be according to this and that stipulation and according to this description. And that is His saying, "a man - when one of you offers [...]. If his sacrifice is a burnt-offering, etc." (Leviticus 1:2-3). (See Parashat Vayikra; Mishneh Torah, Sacrificial Procedure 7.)
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
- 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 Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Binding, with modification
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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) cols. XIII-XXIX read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 7:2-3 expanded it homiletically
- Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, Piska 6 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.198-256 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.224-236 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Hebrews 10:1-10 treated it as abrogated Sacrificial cult treated as a shadow superseded by the singular offering of Christ
- Romans 12:1 read it spiritually Bodies presented as a 'living sacrifice'
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 1 read it allegorically
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 22 rejected it polemically
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 22:34-37 carried a parallel
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.
- ugaritic texts Ugaritic sacrificial rubrics use terminology (šlmm = shelamim / well-being offering; dbḥ = zebach / slaughter-sacrifice) directly cognate to Hebrew cultic vocabulary, demonstrating shared Northwest Semitic sacrificial categories and offering taxonomies Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.39; 1.41 Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, WAW 10 (SBL, 2002)
- ugaritic texts Ugaritic offering-list tablets specify sequential animal and grain offerings by type and deity recipient, paralleling the Priestly torat ha-qorbanot in its concern for classifying and ordering multiple offering types in a systematic rubric Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary KTU 1.105; 1.109 (Ugaritic offering-list tablets) Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, WAW 10 (SBL, 2002)
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.