Every offering of your meal offering you shall season with salt. You shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your meal offering. With all your offerings you shall offer salt.
To salt every offering brought upon the altar
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עַל כָּל קָרְבָּנְךָ תַּקְרִיב מֶלַח
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להקריב מלח על כל קרבן, והוא אמרו על כל קרבנך תקריב מלח. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה בספרא ובמנחות. (ויקרא, איסורי מזבח פרק ה'):
That is that He commanded us to offer salt on every sacrifice. And that is His saying, "on all of your sacrifices, offer salt" (Leviticus 2:13). And the regulations of this commandment were already explained in the Sifra and in Menachot. (See Parashat Vayikra; Mishneh Torah, Things Forbidden on the Altar 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 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
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 Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- Temple Scroll (11Q19), sacrificial-salt prescriptions affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.227 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Mark 9:49 read it spiritually 'everyone will be salted with fire' transposes sacrificial salt into eschatological/paraenetic metaphor
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.