But if you refrain from making a vow, it shall be no sin in you.
Not to delay the fulfillment of vows or voluntary offerings beyond three festivals
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי־תִדֹּר נֶדֶר לַיהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לֹא תְאַחֵר לְשַׁלְּמוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מלאחר הנדרים והנדבות ושאר הקרבנות שהם חובה עליו. והוא אמרו יתעלה כי תדור נדר לה' לא תאחר וגו' ובאה הקבלה שהוא אינו עובר על לאו זה עד שיעברו עליו שלשה רגלים כסדרן. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפרק ראשון מראש השנה. (כי תצא, הלכות מעשה הקרבנות פי"ד):
He prohibited us from delaying vows, voluntary offerings and other sacrifices which are obligatory for one. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "When you make a vow to the Lord [...], do not delay, etc." (Deuteronomy 23:22). And the tradition appeared (Rosh Hashanah 4b), that one has not transgressed this negative commandment until three consecutive holidays have passed him by. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the first chapter of Rosh Hashanah. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, Sacrificial Procedure 14.)
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 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.
- Requires a standing Temple
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 As the catalog records it: binding biblical only
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 2.9-38 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Matthew 5:33-37 The catalog describes this reception as: tangential Sermon on the Mount counsel against swearing oaths (horkos) altogether; thematically adjacent to the Deuteronomic ambivalence toward vows but addressing oath-swearing rather than the bal te'acher delay of votive offerings specifically
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 5:89 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.
- hittite vassal treaties Hittite treaties treat sworn oath obligations as immediately binding on the vassal; failure to fulfill the oath invites divine punishment from the witness-gods, paralleling the Deuteronomic warning that YHWH will 'require' the unfulfilled vow Relationship to the parallel: shared theme oath-stipulation clauses (illustratively, the Mursili II–Duppi-Tessub treaty and the Suppiluliuma I–Shattiwaza treaty; precise clause divisions per Beckman's edition) Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999)
- ugaritic texts the Kirta epic narrates a hero's vow to Athirat (Asherah) in exchange for success; on a plausible but reconstructed reading of the fragmentary text, his later affliction is connected to the unfulfilled vow — offering a West Semitic literary analogue to the Deuteronomic concern with vow-fulfillment, though the causal link is interpretively contested Relationship to the parallel: shared theme KTU 1.14 IV (Kirta's vow to Athirat/Asherah for victory) and the subsequent narrative (1.15-1.16) Parker, ed., Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (SBL, 1997); cf. 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.