“ ‘No meal offering which you shall offer to Yahweh shall be made with yeast; for you shall burn no yeast, nor any honey, as an offering made by fire to Yahweh.
Not to offer any leaven or honey upon the altar
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כָּל־הַמִּנְחָה אֲשֶׁר תַּקְרִיבוּ לַיהוָה לֹא תֵעָשֶׂה חָמֵץ כִּי כָל־שְׂאֹר וְכָל־דְּבַשׁ לֹא־תַקְטִירוּ מִמֶּנּוּ אִשֶּׁה לַיהוָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מהקריב שאור או דבש, והוא אמרו כי כל שאור וכל דבש לא תקטירו. וכבר נכפלה האזהרה מזה הענין בלשון אחר, ואמר כל המנחה אשר תקריבו לה' לא תעשה חמץ וגו'. וכבר בארנו בשרש ט' שמי שהקריב שאור ודבש לוקה אחת ואינו לוקה שתים בעבור היותו לאו שככללות, כמו שבארנו שם, שכבר נתאמת לנו שעל לאו שבכללות לוקין אחת. והמשל בזה מי שהקריב חמץ לוקה אחת, וכן מי שהקריב דבש לוקה אחת, וכן מי שהקריב כאחת שאור ודבש. (ויקרא אל משה, שם):
He prohibited us from offering leaven or honey. And that is His saying, "for you shall burn no leaven, nor any honey" (Leviticus 2:11). And the prohibition about this content has already been repeated with different language - He said (in the same verse), "No meal offering that you offer to the Lord shall be made with leaven, etc." And we already explained in Principle 9 (Sefer HaMitzvot, Shorashim 9:5) that one who offers leaven and honey is lashed one [set of lashes] - and is not lashed two - on account of its being a general negative commandment, as we explained there. As it has already been confirmed for us that we give one [set of] lashes for a general negative commandment. And the illustration of this is that one who burns [an offering] made with leaven is lashed one [set of lashes]; and likewise one who offers honey is lashed one; and likewise one who offers leaven and honey together is lashed one. (See Parashat Vayikra; Mishneh Torah, Things Forbidden on the Altar 1.)
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 ritual instruction
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Requires a standing Temple
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 Inoperative pending the Temple
- Conservative Inoperative pending the Temple
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Inoperative pending the Temple
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 1.291-293 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.235 affirmed it
The New Testament
- 1 Corinthians 5:6-8 read it allegorically Paul develops leaven (zymē) as a symbol of malice and corruption to be purged, drawing on the cultic/Passover leaven exclusion
- Matthew 16:6-12 read it allegorically 'leaven of the Pharisees' as figure for corrupting teaching
The Church Fathers
- Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 3.3 read it spiritually
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.
- hittite ritual texts cultic offering lists that include honey and sweetened/leavened offerings to deities Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast various (e.g. instructions/festival offering lists in the CTH ritual corpus) general reference; cf. ANET and Hittite ritual editions — no single law-code section applies
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.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Rambam (Hilkhot Issurei Mizbeach 5:1–2) prescribes lashes for offering leavened or honey-containing material on the altar; modern proportionality principles preclude corporal punishment for an ingredient infraction in a cultic ceremony that causes no harm to any person.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Post-Enlightenment penal codes do not criminalize violations of sacrificial altar-composition rules, and flogging is not a permissible sanction in any contemporary legal system for ritual procedural infractions.
-
rabbinic tradition
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that corporal jurisdiction lapsed with the dissolution of the Sanhedrin; additionally, the commandment presupposes an operative Temple, making it doubly inoperative in the current era.