Commandments · Positive commandments

To offer the additional Sabbath offering (musaf) each week

#82 Positive commandment Numbers 28:9

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

וּבְיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת שְׁנֵי כְבָשִׂים בְּנֵי שָׁנָה תְּמִימִם

In Maimonides’ words

How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.

היא שצוה להקריב קרבן בכל שבת ושבת מוסף על תמיד של כל יום ויום, והוא אמרו שני כבשים בני שנה. וכבר התבאר סדר הקרבתו בפרק שני מיומא ותמיד. (פינחס, תמידין ומוספין פ"ד):

That is that He commanded to offer a sacrifice on every Shabbat in addition to the regular offering of every day. And that is His saying, "two one-year old lambs" (Numbers 28:9). And the order of their offering has already been explained in the second chapter in Yoma and in Tamid. (See Parashat Pinchas; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 4)

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 Binding, with modification
  • 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)

  • 4Q365/4Q365a (4QReworkedPentateuch) reworking calendrical-sacrificial prescriptions, including additional offerings expanded it homiletically
  • 11Q19 (Temple Scroll) cols. on the sacrificial calendar reinterpreted it

Philo of Alexandria

  • De Specialibus Legibus 1.168-170 (description of continual [tamid] and additional offerings) rationalized it

Josephus

  • Antiquities 3.237 paraphrased 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.

  • ugaritic texts calendrical sacrificial schedule tied to lunar dates Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.41 / 1.87 Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (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.

Source & licence

The commentary, cross-references, reception, and modern-conflict analysis in this section are drawn from a public compilation of the 613 commandments, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The cited biblical text is rendered from GEBible’s own public-domain reading corpus. CC BY-SA 4.0 (opens in a new tab). GEBible’s presentation of this material is offered under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.