“ ‘When anyone offers an offering of a meal offering to Yahweh, his offering shall be of fine flour. He shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense on it.
To offer the meal offering (minchah) according to its prescribed ritual
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְנֶפֶשׁ כִּי־תַקְרִיב קָרְבַּן מִנְחָה לַיהוָה סֹלֶת יִהְיֶה קָרְבָּנוֹ וְיָצַק עָלֶיהָ שֶׁמֶן וְנָתַן עָלֶיהָ לְבֹנָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שיהיה מעשה המנחה על תואר כך הנזכר בכל מין ומין ממנה, והוא אמרו יתעלה ונפש כי תקריב קרבן מנחה לה', ואם מנחה על המחבת, ואם מנחת מרחשת, ואמר להשלמת המעשה וזאת תורת המנחה. ומשפטי מצוה זו עם רוב עניניה הם מבוארים במסכת מנחות. (ויקרא אל משה, מעשה קרבנות פי"ג):
That is that He commanded us with the process of the meal-offering sacrifices, according to the description that is mentioned for each and every type. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "When a person offers a sacrifice of a meal-offering to the Lord [...]. And if your meal-offering is on a griddle [...]. And if your meal-offering is in a deep pan" (Leviticus 2:1, 5, 7). And He said with the completion of the process, "And that is the law of the meal-offering" (Leviticus 6:7). And the regulations of this commandment and most of its content is explained in Tractate Menachot. (See Parashat Vayikra; Mishneh Torah, Sacrificial Procedure 13.)
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
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 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19), festival-calendar / sacrificial columns (approx. cols. XIII-XXIX) The catalog describes this reception as: rewritten law / harmonizing expansion
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 8:4 expanded it homiletically
- b. Menachot 104b expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.271-272 read it allegorically the fine flour and frugality of the meal offering as symbol of the soul's purity and the equal access of rich and poor
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.233-236 affirmed it paraphrase of the minchah procedures and priestly portions
The New Testament
- Hebrews 10:1-10 treated it as abrogated Christological supersession of the sacrificial system generally (citing Ps 40:6-8, LXX Ps 39:7, on 'sacrifice and offering'); the grain offering is included only by implication within the broader cultic apparatus
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 offering lists include grain and bread offerings (minḥatu cognates) alongside animal sacrifices, attesting that cereal offerings were a standard category in Northwest Semitic temple ritual, structurally parallel to the Priestly minchah system Relationship to the parallel: shared theme KTU 1.39; 1.41 (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.