when you listen to Yahweh your God’s voice, to keep all his commandments which I command you today, to do that which is right in Yahweh your God’s eyes.
Not to derive any benefit from the spoils of an apostate city
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא־יִדְבַּק בְּיָדְךָ מְאוּמָה מִן־הַחֵרֶם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו שלא ליהנות ולהחזיק כלל בדבר ממון של עיר הנדחת. והוא אמרו יתעלה ולא ידבק בידך מאומה מן החרם, ומי שלקח ממנו מאומה חייב מלקות. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בעשירי מסנהדרין. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited us - that we not benefit from, or at all hold on to, wealth from a condemned city. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "And let nothing that has been doomed stick to your hand" (Deuteronomy 13:18). And anyone who has taken anything from it is liable for lashes. And the regulations 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.
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
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- 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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifre Deuteronomy 96 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.315-318 paraphrased it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.310 paraphrased 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 Neo-Assyrian loyalty-oath (adê) provisions against sedition and incitement to disloyalty, with associated curse formulae, frequently argued to underlie the structure of Deut 13's apostasy and instigation legislation Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary Esarhaddon's Succession Treaty (adê), loyalty-oath and sedition/curse formulae Parpola and 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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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Flogging for deriving benefit from the property of a destroyed apostate city — property that the commandment requires to be burned rather than distributed — is a sanction applicable to conduct that no modern legal system recognizes as an offense, making the enforcement method incompatible with any modern penal framework.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The prescription of thirty-nine lashes for taking benefit from property whose destruction is itself grounded in a religiously-motivated collective massacre violates both the proportionality principle and the more fundamental prohibition on enforcing sanctions whose foundation (the ir ha-nidachat itself) is incompatible with modern law.
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Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The flogging sanction applicable to violations of this prohibition constitutes corporal punishment categorically prohibited under UDHR Article 5 as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.