Three times in a year all of your males shall appear before Yahweh your God in the place which he chooses: in the feast of unleavened bread, in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of booths. They shall not appear before Yahweh empty.
Not to appear before God empty-handed on the three pilgrim festivals
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא יֵרָאֶה אֶת־פְּנֵי יְהוָה רֵיקָם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו מעלות לרגל מבלי קרבן שיהיה עמנו ונקריבנו שם. והוא אמרו יתעלה ולא יראו פני ריקם ועל כל פנים יהיו עולה ושלמים. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת חגיגה. ומצוה זו אין נשים חייבות בה. (כי תשא, הלכות חגיגה פ"א):
That He prohibited us from going up on pilgrimage without there being a sacrifice with us, such that we sacrifice it there. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "and none shall appear before Me empty-handed" (Exodus 23:15). And in any event, there should be a burnt-offering and peace-offerings. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Hagigah. However, women are not obligated in this commandment. (See Parashat Ki Tissa; Mishneh Torah, Festival Offering 1.)
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.
- 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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- 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 Specialibus Legibus 1.168 rationalized it Philo's rationalizing treatment of festival offerings; cited as representative of his discussion of pilgrimage sacrifice rather than as a pinpoint exegesis of the empty-handed clause.
Josephus
- Ant. 4.203-204 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Luke 2:41-42 affirmed it Narrative attestation of annual Passover pilgrimage practice in late Second Temple period.
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.
- hittite vassal treaties Hittite vassal treaties generally require the vassal to appear periodically before the suzerain bearing tribute, reflecting a suzerain-audience logic broadly comparable to Israel's obligation to appear before YHWH with an offering; the parallel is structural/conceptual rather than a direct textual borrowing Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary general annual tribute and audience provisions found across the Hittite suzerain-vassal treaty corpus Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999)
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.