“ ‘Also in the day of the first fruits, when you offer a new meal offering to Yahweh in your feast of weeks, you shall have a holy convocation. You shall do no regular work; but you shall offer a burnt offering for a pleasant aroma to Yahweh: two young bulls, one ram, seven male lambs a year old;
To offer the additional offering on the festival of Shavuot
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהִקְרַבְתֶּם עוֹלָה לְרֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ לַיהוָה פָּרִים בְּנֵי־בָקָר שְׁנַיִם אַיִל אֶחָד שִׁבְעָה כְבָשִׂים בְּנֵי שָׁנָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצוה להקריב קרבן מוסף גם כן ביום חמשים מהקרבתם העומר שהוא ששה עשר בניסן, וזהו מוסף עצרת הנזכר בספר במדבר סיני. והוא אמרו יתעלה וביום הבכורים בהקריבכם. (פינחס, תמידין ומוספין פרק ח'):
That is that He commanded to also offer an additional sacrifice on the fiftieth day from the offering of the omer, [the latter being on] the 16th of Nissan. And that is the additional sacrifice of Atzeret (Shavuot) mentioned in the Book of Numbers. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "On the day of the first fruits, when you offer" (Numbers 28:26). (See Parashat Pinchas; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 8)
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 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) cols. xviii-xxiii (Feast of Weeks / New Wheat firstfruits section of the festival calendar) The catalog describes this reception as: expanded
Rabbinic aggadah
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 12 (Ba-ḥodesh; ed. Mandelbaum) expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.176-187 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.252-257 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Acts 2:1 reinterpreted it Pentecost reframed as the day of the Spirit's descent; the agricultural/sacrificial frame is supplanted
- Acts 20:16 carried a parallel Paul hastening to Jerusalem for Pentecost, attesting continued festival observance
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 Month-by-month cultic calendar prescribing agricultural offerings at the seasonal harvest transitions, a West Semitic structural analogue to the Israelite harvest-conclusion festival musaf Relationship to the parallel: shared theme KTU 1.41 (Ugaritic cultic calendar prescribing seasonal agricultural offerings) Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 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.