Fire shall be kept burning on the altar continually; it shall not go out.
The High Priest shall offer a meal offering twice daily
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
זֶה קָרְבַּן אַהֲרֹן וּבָנָיו אֲשֶׁר־יַקְרִיבוּ לַיהוָה בְּיוֹם הִמָּשַׁח אֹתוֹ עֲשִׂירִת הָאֵפָה סֹלֶת מִנְחָה תָּמִיד מַחֲצִיתָהּ בַּבֹּקֶר וּמַחֲצִיתָהּ בָּעָרֶב
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שיקריב כהן גדול בכל יום תמיד מנחה בבקר ומנחה בערב והיא נקראת חבתי כהן גדול, ותקרא גם כן מנחת כהן משיח, והוא אמרו יתעלה זה קרבן אהרן ובניו, וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו ומתי תקרב במנחות וביומא ותמיד. (צו, תמידין ומוספין פ"ג):
That is that He commanded us that the high priest offer a regular grain offering every day in the morning and in the afternoon. And that is called the griddle-cakes of the high priest and it is also called the grain offering of the anointed priest. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "This is the offering of Aharon and his sons" (Leviticus 6:13). And the regulations of this commandment and when it is offered have already been explained in Menachot, in Yoma and in Tamid. (See Parashat Tzav; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 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
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 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.256-257 (approx.) read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.257 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.
- ugaritic texts calendrical cultic provisioning of the deity with offerings on a fixed schedule (general analogue, not a specific twice-daily parallel) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.41 / 1.87 del Olmo Lete, Canaanite Religion According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit (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.