“ ‘Notwithstanding, no devoted thing that a man devotes to Yahweh of all that he has, whether of man or animal, or of the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed. Everything that is permanently devoted is most holy to Yahweh.
Not to redeem property devoted under the ban (cherem)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כָּל־חֵרֶם ... לֹא יִמָּכֵר וְלֹא יִגָּאֵל
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מפדות סתם חרמי הארץ. והוא אמרו לא ימכר ולא יגאל. ולשון ספרי לא יגאל לבעלים. מה יעשה לו כשדה החרם לכהן תהיה אחוזתו. או יכול אע"פ שפירש לשם תלמוד לומר הוא. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו כלומר שדה חרמי כהנים במסכת ערכין (דף כ"ח:) ושם נתבאר שסתם חרמים לכהנים. ושם נאמר חרמי כהנים אין להם פדיון אלא נתנין לכהן כתרומה. (שם, שם):
He prohibited us from redeeming unspecified dedications of land. And that is His saying, "it shall not be sold and it shall not be redeemed" (Leviticus 27:28). And the language of the [Sifra] (Sifra, Bechukotai, Chapter 12:4) is, "'And it shall not be redeemed' - by the owner. What shall he do with it? 'To the priest shall be his holding' (Leviticus 27:21). Or this is perhaps [the law] even if he stipulated, 'to the Lord.' [Hence] we learn to say, 'it.'" And the laws of this commandment - meaning, the fields dedicated to the priests - have already been explained in Tractate Arakhin. And there (Arakhin 28b), it is said, "Dedications to the priests do not have redemption, but must be given to the priests, like the priestly tithe (terumah)." (See Parashat Bechukotai; Mishneh Torah, Appraisals and Devoted Property 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 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, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Position not stated
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
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 provisions governing the inheritance shares and dowry (sheriktum) entitlements of temple-dedicated women (nadītu and related classes); offers at most a loose thematic point of comparison for the legal regulation of temple-associated property, but does not address redemption or irreversible dedication and should not be treated as a substantive parallel to the cherem no-redemption rule Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§178-182 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 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.