“ ‘If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without defect. He shall offer it at the door of the Tent of Meeting, that he may be accepted before Yahweh.
To offer the burnt offering (olah) according to its prescribed ritual
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אִם־עֹלָה קָרְבָּנוֹ מִן־הַבָּקָר זָכָר תָּמִים יַקְרִיבֶנּוּ אֶל־פֶּתַח אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד יַקְרִיב אֹתוֹ לִרְצֹנוֹ לִפְנֵי יְהוָה
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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. 13-29 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 7:3 expanded it homiletically
- Genesis Rabbah 56:9 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.198-211 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.225-227 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Hebrews 10:5-10 read it spiritually Christ's death construed as the definitive olah superseding the repeated animal offerings
- Ephesians 5:2 read it spiritually Christ given as 'an offering and sacrifice to God, a fragrant aroma' — appropriating the reach nichoach formula
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homiliae in Leviticum 1 read it allegorically
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 22:36-37 The catalog describes this reception as: distant parallel Concerns hajj sacrificial animals (budn), which are shared/charitable offerings rather than wholly-burnt holocausts; parallel is general cultic sacrifice, not the olah specifically.
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 šrp designates a wholly-burnt offering paired with the šlmm (well-being) offering — the same structural pairing as the Hebrew olah and shelamim — demonstrating that total-combustion burnt offering was a category shared across Northwest Semitic sacrifice systems before the Priestly codification Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.105; 1.109 (Ugaritic sacrificial ritual texts) Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, WAW 10 (SBL, 2002)
- ugaritic texts Ugaritic ritual tablets attesting the šrp (whole burnt offering) as a standard Northwest Semitic temple sacrifice — direct cognate of the Israelite olah, demonstrating that wholly-consumed sacrifice predates and surrounds the Israelite cult rather than originating with it Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.39 and 1.41 (Ugaritic ritual texts from Ras Shamra documenting the šrp / burnt offering) Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, WAW 10 (SBL, 2002)
- hittite ritual texts Hittite temple-ritual texts include fully consumed offerings as one mode among shared-meal sacrifices, paralleling the Israelite distinction between olah (whole-burn) and shelamim (peace offering / shared meal) Relationship to the parallel: shared theme CTH 448 and adjacent purification/sacrificial rituals Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999); broader CTH catalog via Hoffner & Beckman
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.