Commandments · Positive commandments

The priests shall eat the breast and thigh of the peace offering

#606 Positive commandment Leviticus 10:14

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

וְאֵת חֲזֵה הַתְּנוּפָה וְאֵת שׁוֹק הַתְּרוּמָה תֹּאכְלוּ בְּמָקוֹם טָהוֹר אַתָּה וּבָנֶיךָ וּבְנֹתֶיךָ אִתָּךְ

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
  • Binding in the land of Israel

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, with modification
  • 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.

Philo of Alexandria

  • De Specialibus Legibus 1.145-151 rationalized it

Josephus

  • Antiquities 3.228-232 affirmed it

The New Testament

  • 1 Corinthians 9:13 reinterpreted it Paul invokes the principle that those who serve at the altar share in the altar's offerings to justify material support for apostolic ministry

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 allocate specific animal portions to the officiating cult personnel while the remainder is consumed in a communal feast, paralleling the tripartite division of the shelamim between God (fat/blood), priests (breast/thigh), and offerer Relationship to the parallel: shared theme KTU 1.40; 1.41; 1.162 (sacrifice-allocation lists specifying portions for priests vs. offerers vs. the divine recipient) 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.

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.