“ ‘When the days of her purification are completed for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring to the priest at the door of the Tent of Meeting, a year old lamb for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon or a turtledove, for a sin offering.
The woman after childbirth shall bring an offering
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּבִמְלֹאת יְמֵי טָהֳרָהּ לְבֵן אוֹ לְבַת תָּבִיא כֶּבֶשׂ בֶּן־שְׁנָתוֹ לְעֹלָה וּבֶן־יוֹנָה אוֹ־תֹר לְחַטָּאת אֶל־פֶּתַח אֹהֶל־מוֹעֵד אֶל־הַכֹּהֵן
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שתקריב כל יולדת קרבן והוא כבש בן שנתו לעולה ובן יונה או תור לחטאת ואם היתה עניה שתקריב שתי תורים או שני בני יונה אחד לחטאת ואחד לעולה. והיא גם כן מחוסרת כפרה עד שתקריב אותם כמו שאמר ובמלאת ימי טהרה לבן או לבת תביא כבש בן שנתו לעולה ובן יונה או תור וגו'. (אשה כי תזריע, מחוסרי כפרה פ"א):
That is that He commanded us that any woman after childbirth offer a sacrifice - and that is a one-year old lamb as a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtledove as a sin-offering. But if she was poor, she should offer two turtledoves or two young pigeons - one for a sin-offering and one for a burnt-offering. And she is also lacking [full] atonement until she sacrifices them, as He said, "On the completion of her period of purification, for either son or daughter, she shall bring a one-year old lamb for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtledove for a sin-offering, etc." (Leviticus 12:6). (See Parashat Tazria; Mishneh Torah, Offerings for Those with Incomplete Atonement 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 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 Binding, with modification
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 4Q265 frag. 7 The catalog describes this reception as: halakhic expansion
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 14 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261-264 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Luke 2:22-24 The catalog describes this reception as: observed Mary's purification offering of two birds, the poorer-person's option of Lev 12:8, narrating observance of the Levitical postpartum law
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 ritual texts ritual management of impurity and purification associated with childbirth/parturition (genuine functional parallel within the ANE birth-purity koine) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence CTH 476 Beckman, Hittite Birth Rituals (StBoT 29, 1983)
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.