You shall tell them, ‘This is the offering made by fire which you shall offer to Yahweh: male lambs a year old without defect, two day by day, for a continual burnt offering.
To offer the daily burnt offering (tamid) twice each day, morning and evening
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאָמַרְתָּ לָהֶם זֶה הָאִשֶּׁה אֲשֶׁר תַּקְרִיבוּ לַיהוָה כְּבָשִׂים בְּנֵי־שָׁנָה תְמִימִם שְׁנַיִם לַיּוֹם עֹלָה תָמִיד
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להקריב במקדש שני כבשים בני שנה בכל יום, ואלו נקראין תמידין, והוא אמרו שנים ליום עולה תמיד. וכבר התבאר סדר הקרבתן ומעשיהן ביומא ובמסכת תמיד. (פינחס, תמידין ומוספין פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to sacrifice two one-year old lambs in the Temple everyday, and these are called the daily offerings (temidin). And this is His saying, "two a day as a regular burnt offering" (Numbers 28:3) And the order and process of their offering has already been explained in Yoma and in Tractate Tamid. (See Parashat Pinchas; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 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
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) XIII-XIV The catalog describes this reception as: expansion
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 56:9 expanded it homiletically
- Leviticus Rabbah 9:7 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.168-170 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.237 affirmed it
- Ant. 14.65 affirmed it
- War 6.94 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Luke 1:9-10 carried a parallel Zechariah's incense service set during the hour of the tamid sacrifice, with the assembled people praying outside
- Acts 3:1 carried a parallel Peter and John go up to the Temple at the 'ninth hour' of prayer, corresponding to the afternoon tamid
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.
- neo babylonian temple archives provision of regular daily food, drink, and incense offerings to the resident deity's statue, with morning and evening presentations as standard cultic rhythm — the institutional parallel to the twice-daily tamid Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Temple administrative texts: sattukkū / ginû regular-offering records from Eanna (Uruk) and Ebabbar (Sippar) Linssen, The Cults of Uruk and Babylon: The Temple Ritual Texts as Evidence for Hellenistic Cult Practice (Cuneiform Monographs 25, Brill, 2004); Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk during the Neo-Babylonian Period (Cuneiform Monographs 23, Brill, 2003)
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.