but you shall surely kill him. Your hand shall be first on him to put him to death, and afterwards the hands of all the people.
Not to love or desire an enticer to idol worship
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תֹאבֶה לוֹ וְלֹא תִשְׁמַע אֵלָיו
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהיר המוסת מלאהוב המסית ולהאזין לדבריו. והוא אמרו יתעלה לא תאבה לו. ולשון ספרי מכלל שנאמר ואהבת לרעך כמוך יכול אתה אוהב לזה, תלמוד לומר לא תאבה לו. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited an incited one from loving the inciter and from listening to his words. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "Do not esteem him" (Deuteronomy 13:9). And the language of the Sifrei (Sifrei Devarim 89:1) is, "It is implied from its being stated, 'you shall love your neighbor like yourself' (Leviticus 19:18) [that] perhaps you should love this one. [Hence] we learn to say, 'Do not esteem him.'" (See Parashat Re'eh; Mishneh Torah, Foreign Worship and Customs of the Nations 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 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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite As the catalog records it: unspecified
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 1.315-318 carried a parallel Philo discusses the seducer to idolatry and endorses suppressing kin-affection toward such a person, intensifying the Deuteronomic demand.
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.310 carried a parallel
The New Testament
- Matthew 10:37 carried a parallel Loyalty to the central object of devotion overrides familial affection ('he who loves father or mother more than me...'); a structural echo of the totalistic-loyalty logic, though oriented toward Jesus rather than against an enticer.
- Luke 14:26 carried a parallel Hyperbolic demand to 'hate' family for the sake of discipleship; comparable subordination of intimate bonds to ultimate loyalty.
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 9:23-24 carried a parallel
- Q 58:22 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.
- neo assyrian vassal treaties obligation to report and not conceal seditious speech, including from brother, son, daughter, or intimate, against the sovereign Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§10, 12 Parpola & Watanabe, SAA 2 (1988)
- neo assyrian vassal treaties demand for undivided love/loyalty toward the suzerain and his heir Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§24-25 Parpola & Watanabe, SAA 2 (1988)
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.
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UDHR Articles 18–19
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment prohibits granting consent or emotional assent to a person who advocates alternative religious beliefs, treating the internal disposition of affection or willingness as a legally cognizable offense; freedom of conscience encompasses the right to receive and evaluate religious claims without state-mandated emotional responses.
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Article 18 (freedom of thought and conscience)
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The prohibition regulates an internal affective state — forbidding the natural feeling of love for a close family member because of their religious advocacy — in a manner that penetrates the innermost sphere of thought and feeling that ICCPR Article 18 identifies as absolutely inviolable and not subject to any limitation whatsoever.