Commandments · Positive commandments

To judge cases of personal injury and assign the five types of compensation

#600 Positive commandment Exodus 21:18-19

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

רַק שִׁבְתּוֹ יִתֵּן וְרַפֹּא יְרַפֵּא

Literary form: a case law — "if X, then Y"

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

  • A monetary penalty

At the hands of Heaven

No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.

Ritual remedy

  • Restitution (tashlumin)

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 Kept as an ethical principle
  • Reform Kept as an ethical principle
  • Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
  • Karaite Binding, with modification

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 Spec. Leg. 3.106-107 affirmed it

Josephus

  • Ant. 4.280 reinterpreted it

The New Testament

  • Matthew 5:38-39 reinterpreted it Cites 'eye for eye, tooth for tooth' and counsels non-retaliation, presupposing a literal-talion reading rather than the rabbinic monetary one

The Qur'an and hadith

  • Q 5:45 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 compensation for medical costs of a non-fatal blow struck in a quarrel Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §206 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
  • code of hammurabi lex talionis graded by social class Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§196-201 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
  • laws of eshnunna fixed monetary fines for specific bodily injuries Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§42-47 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
  • hittite laws assailant pays for healing and lost labor; in the earlier (Old Hittite) recension the assailant additionally provides a substitute worker during the victim's recovery Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §10 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites (1997)
  • laws of ur nammu fixed silver compensation for bodily injuries Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§18-22 (approximate; partially reconstructed) Roth, Law Collections 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.

Source & licence

The commentary, cross-references, reception, and modern-conflict analysis in this section are drawn from a public compilation of the 613 commandments, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The cited biblical text is rendered from GEBible’s own public-domain reading corpus. CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab). GEBible’s presentation of this material is offered under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.