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 withhold testimony against the enticer to idol worship
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא תְכַסֶּה עָלָיו
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהיר המוסת מלשתוק בחובה שידע אותה למסית ממה שיעמוד להעמיד העונש עליו. והוא אמרו יתעלה ולא תכסה עליו ובא הפירוש לא תכסה עליו אם אתה יודע לו חובה אי אתה רשאי לשתוק. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited an incited one from being silent about something incriminating that he knows about the inciter that will bring about the punishment upon him. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "and you may not shield him" (Deuteronomy 13:9). And it appears in the explanation (Sifrei Devarim 89:4), "'And you may not shield him' - if you know something incriminating about him, you are not allowed to remain silent." (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.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Position not stated
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 affirmed it
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 (not conceal) seditious speech, including from brothers, sons, daughters Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §10 (report-obligation clauses, lines ~108-122) 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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ICCPR Article 14
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment compels an individual who has received a private religious solicitation to report it and to testify against a family member, while simultaneously authorizing concealed-witness entrapment unique in the halakhic system to that case type; ICCPR Article 14 prohibits compelled self-incrimination of related parties and entrapment procedures, both of which the mesit testimonial framework employs.
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general principle (entrapment doctrine)
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 67a) explicitly permits concealed-witness entrapment in the mesit case as the sole exception to the general prohibition on such procedures in Jewish law; modern criminal law systems across common-law and civil-law jurisdictions regard entrapment — inducing and covertly recording a private conversation — as a serious procedural violation that ordinarily renders the resulting evidence inadmissible.