You shall bring out of your habitations two loaves of bread for a wave offering made of two tenths of an ephah of fine flour. They shall be baked with yeast, for first fruits to Yahweh.
To bring two loaves of bread as a wave offering on Shavuot
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
מִמּוֹשְׁבֹתֵיכֶם תָּבִיאוּ לֶחֶם תְּנוּפָה שְׁתַּיִם שְׁנֵי עֶשְׂרֹנִים סֹלֶת תִּהְיֶינָה חָמֵץ תֵּאָפֶינָה בִּכּוּרִים לַיהוָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להביא שתי הלחם חמץ למקדש עם הקרבנות שהם יבאו בכלל הלחם בעצרת המוגבל להקריב קרבן כמו שבא בויקרא, ושיאכלו הכהנים שתי הלחם אחר הנפתם עם כבשי השלמים, והוא אמרו יתעלה ויתברך שמו ממושבותיכם תביאו לחם תנופה. וכבר התבאר במנחות שזה הקרבן הבא בגלל הלחם חלוק ממוסף היום ושזה זולת זה. וכבר בארנו אנחנו זה באור מספיק בפירוש מסכת מנחות. וכבר נתבארו משפטי מצוה זו כולם במסכת מנחות בפרק ד' וח' וי"א. (אמור, תמידין ומוספין פ"ח):
That is that He commanded us to bring two breads of chametz to the Temple with the sacrifices that come with the bread on Shavuot - which is fixed for the bringing of the sacrifice, as it appears in Leviticus - and that the priests eat the two breads, after their waving, with the lambs of the peace offering. And that is His, may He be exalted and may His name be blessed, saying, "You shall bring from your settlements bread as a wave offering" (Leviticus 23:17). And it has already been explained in Menachot (Menachot 45b) that this sacrifice that comes because of the bread is separate from the additional sacrifice of the day, and that this one is different than that one. And we ourselves have already explained this with sufficient elucidation in the commentary on Tractate Menachot (Commentary on the Mishnah). And the regulations of this commandment have already all been explained in Tractate Menachot, Chapters 4, 8 and 11. (See Parashat Emor; Mishneh Torah, Daily 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
- 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 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 18-19 The catalog describes this reception as: systematized/harmonized
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.179-188 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.252-253 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Acts 2:1-4 reinterpreted it Pentecost (Shavuot) outpouring of the Spirit; festival recontextualized christologically
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 seasonal cereal and animal offerings to the deities; structural analogue to a fixed festival-offering rubric Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence KTU 1.41 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.