or a charmer, or someone who consults with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
Not to consult a wizard or familiar spirit
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְשֹׁאֵל אוֹב וְיִדְּעֹנִי וְדֹרֵשׁ אֶל־הַמֵּתִים
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו משאול בידעוני. והוא אמרו יתעלה לא ימצא בך וגו' וידעוני. ולשון ספרא אל תפנו אל האובות ואל הידעונים, אוב זה פיתום המדבר משחיו, ידעוני המדבר בפיו, הרי אלו בסקילה והשואל בהם באזהרה. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited us from inquiring of a yidaoni. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "Let no one be found among you ... [or one who asks an ov] or a yidaoni" (Deuteronomy 18:10-11). And the language of the [Sifrei] (Sifrei Devarim 172:2-3) is, "Ov is a necromancer that speaks from his armpits; yidaoni is one that speaks from his mouth." Behold these are [liable for] stoning, but one who inquires of them is [only liable for having violated a] prohibition. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Foreign Worship and Customs of the Nations 11.)
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 prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
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
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite 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 1.59-65 rejected it polemically
Josephus
- Ant. 6.327-342 affirmed it Recounts Saul's expulsion of the engastrimythoi (ventriloquist-diviners) and his later consultation of the woman of Endor, treating the prior purge as pious
The New Testament
- Acts 16:16-18 rejected it polemically Paul exorcises a slave-girl with a pythonic/divining spirit (πνεῦμα πύθωνα); reflects narrative continuity of hostility toward spirit-divination rather than direct application of the Deuteronomic legal ban
The Qur'an and hadith
- Sahih Muslim 2230 carried a parallel Hadith condemning consultation of a diviner (arraf/kahin), stating the prayers of one who does so are not accepted for forty days — a functional parallel to the biblical prohibition on consulting spirit-specialists
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.
- middle assyrian laws prescribes death for a person who makes or commissions magical preparations (kishpū) against another, demonstrating that sorcery was a capital matter in Assyrian law; useful as comparative context for Israelite hostility to illicit ritual power, though it concerns witchcraft accusation rather than the regulated spirit-consultation specialist Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet A §47 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- gilgamesh epic Enkidu's ghost (eṭemmu) is brought up from the netherworld when, after Enlil and Sin refuse, Ea intervenes and Nergal opens an aperture in the earth, allowing the dead to be questioned by the living; attests the broader Mesopotamian institution of consulting the dead that the biblical prohibition targets, though the mediation here is divine rather than by a šā'ilu Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet XII George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003)
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.