Nothing of the devoted thing shall cling to your hand, that Yahweh may turn from the fierceness of his anger and show you mercy, and have compassion on you and multiply you, as he has sworn to your fathers,
Not to rebuild an apostate city
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהָיְתָה תֵּל עוֹלָם לֹא תִבָּנֶה עוֹד
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו שלא לבנות עיר הנדחת. והוא אמרו יתעלה תל עולם לא תבנה עוד. וכל מי שיבנה בה דבר חייב מלקות ר"ל בשיושיב אותה מדינה כאשר היתה. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו בעשירי מסנהדרין. (ראה אנכי, שם פ"ד):
That He prohibited us from rebuilding a condemned city. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "a heap forever; it shall not be built again" (Deuteronomy 13:17). And anyone who builds something in it - meaning that he turns it back into a city, as it had been - is liable for lashes. And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in the tenth [chapter] of Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Re'eh; Mishneh Torah, Foreign Worship and Customs of the Nations 4.)
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.
- 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
- 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
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Binding
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
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 royal inscriptions Assyrian royal inscriptions record the razing of rebellious cities, sometimes with prohibitions against rebuilding, presenting the ruin as a permanent monument to royal/divine punishment; the Deuteronomic tel olam command parallels this ANE practice of sacralizing urban destruction Relationship to the parallel: shared theme royal annals destruction/site-curse formulae (general; razing of rebel cities with rebuilding prohibition) Grayson, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods (RIMA)
- hittite vassal treaties Hittite vassal treaties include destruction clauses for cities found in rebellion against the Hittite king; the tel olam concept has broad structural parallels in Hittite imperial destruction ideology Relationship to the parallel: shared theme curse sections (general) Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999)
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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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The commandment imposes thirty-nine lashes for rebuilding a city destroyed on grounds of collective religious apostasy; post-Enlightenment penal codes do not recognize either collective religious apostasy as an offense or corporal punishment as an acceptable sanction, making the method of enforcement categorically incompatible with modern criminal law.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The flogging sanction for reconstructing a settlement — an act of habitation and community restoration — is disproportionate by any modern penal standard, and the religious-persecution premise underlying the destruction itself renders the rebuilding prohibition itself without legitimate foundation in secular law.
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Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Thirty-nine lashes prescribed by rabbinic tradition as the punishment for rebuilding the apostate city constitutes corporal punishment categorically prohibited by UDHR Article 5 as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.