You shall give him the first fruits of your grain, of your new wine, and of your oil, and the first of the fleece of your sheep.
To give the first shearing of the flock to the priest
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְרֵאשִׁית גֵּז צֹאנְךָ תִּתֶּן־לּוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לתת ראשית הגז לכהן, והוא אמרו יתברך ראשית גז צאנך תתן לו. ומצוה זו אינה נוהגת אלא בארץ. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפרק י"א מחולין. (שופטים ושוטרים, הלכות בכורים פ"י):
That is that He commanded us to give the first shearing to the priest. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "The first shearing of your sheep [...] shall you give him" (Deuteronomy 18:4). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Chapter 11 of Chullin. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Firstlings 10.)
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 command
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
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 Not binding
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Position uncertain
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 1.131-144 (priestly dues and first-fruits generally; not specific to reshit gez) rationalized 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.
- ugaritic texts Ugaritic ritual texts attest systems of allocating sacrificial produce and offerings to temple personnel — a broadly parallel institutional pattern of cultic prebendary support, though an explicit first-shearing/wool due is not directly attested Relationship to the parallel: shared theme KTU 1.41 and related Ugaritic sacrificial/ritual texts Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 2002)
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.