“ ‘When he who has a discharge is cleansed of his discharge, then he shall count to himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes; and he shall bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean. “ ‘On the eighth day he shall take two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, and come before Yahweh to the door of the Tent of Meeting, and give them to the priest. The priest shall offer them, the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering. The priest shall make atonement for him before Yahweh for his discharge.
The man with a seminal emission shall bring an offering after purification
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִי־יִטְהַר הַזָּב מִזּוֹבוֹ וְסָפַר לוֹ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים לְטָהֳרָתוֹ ... וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי יִקַּח־לוֹ שְׁתֵּי תֹרִים אוֹ שְׁנֵי בְּנֵי יוֹנָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שיקריב קרבן כל איש זב שנתרפא מזובו וזהו קרבן הזב, והוא מחוסר כפרה עד שיקריבהו, והוא אמרו יתעלה ויתברך שמו וכי יטהר הזב מזובו וביום השמיני יקח לו שתי תורים. (זאת תהיה, מחוסרי כפרה פ"א גם פ"ב וג'):
That is that He commanded us that any man who is healed from a discharge offer a sacrifice. And this is the sacrifice of the zav; and he is lacking [full] atonement until he offers it. And that is His, may He be exalted and may His name be blessed, saying, "When one with a discharge becomes clean of his discharge [...]. On the eighth day he shall take two turtledoves" (Leviticus 15:13-14). (See Parashat Metzora; Mishneh Torah, Offerings for Those with Incomplete Atonement 1-3.)
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 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
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
- A sin-offering (ḥatat)
- A burnt-offering (olah)
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 Not binding
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 4Q274 (4QTohorot A) read it more strictly
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261-264 affirmed it
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 instructions regulations restricting individuals with bodily impurity from access to the deity's cultic space, paralleling the Levitical zav's exclusion from the sanctuary during discharge Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Instructions to Priests and Temple Officials (CTH 264), provisions relating to bodily purity and access to the temple precinct J. L. Miller, Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts (SBL WAW, 2013) for CTH 264; older translation in Pritchard, ANET (1969), pp. 207-210 (Instructions to Temple Officials)
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.