“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which Yahweh your God gives you.
To honor one's father and mother
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כַּבֵּד אֶת־אָבִיךָ וְאֶת־אִמֶּךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לכבד אב ואם. והוא אמרו יתעלה כבד את אביך ואת אמך. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בתלמוד ועיקרו בקדושין. ולשון ספרא איזהו כבוד מאכיל ומשקה מכניס ומוציא. (וישמע יתרו, הלכות ממרים פ"ו):
That is that He commanded us to honor [our] father and mother. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "You shall honor your father and mother" (Exodus 20:12). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the Talmud, primarily in Kiddushin. And the language of the Sifra (Sifra, Kedoshim, Section 1:10) is, "Which is honor? Giving to eat, giving to drink [...], bringing in and taking out." (See Parashat Yitro; Mishneh Torah, Rebels 6.)
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 flat, unconditional command
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 Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite 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)
- Decalogue circulated at Qumran (cf. 4QDeut^n and the broader Decalogue-excerpt tradition); no distinct sectarian halakhic development of the Honor-parents clause is preserved affirmed it
Rabbinic aggadah
- Devarim Rabbah 1:15-16 (edition-dependent; Esau's honoring of Isaac as exemplary) expanded it homiletically
- Pesikta Rabbati 23-24 (Decalogue homilies) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Decalogo 165-167 rationalized it
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.224-241 rationalized it
Josephus
- Contra Apionem 2.206 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Mark 7:9-13 affirmed it Jesus upholds the commandment against the qorban evasion that voids the duty to support parents; Mark 7:10 cites both Exod 20:12 and Exod 21:17
- Matthew 15:4-6 affirmed it cites both Exod 20:12 and Exod 21:17
- Ephesians 6:2-3 affirmed it labels it 'the first commandment with a promise'
The Church Fathers
- Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4.16.3-5 affirmed it
- Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum 71 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 17:23-24 carried a parallel
- Q 31:14 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.
- code of hammurabi penalties concerning the adopted child of a palace official (girseqû) or consecrated woman (sekretu) who repudiates the foster parents (§§192-193) and for a son who strikes his father (§195, hand severed) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§192-193, 195 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
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.