You shall offer a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, of a pleasant aroma to Yahweh: thirteen young bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old, all without defect;
To offer the additional offerings during the festival of Sukkot
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהִקְרַבְתֶּם עֹלָה אִשֵּׁה רֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ לַיהוָה פָּרִים בְּנֵי־בָקָר שְׁלֹשָׁה עָשָׂר אֵילִם שְׁנָיִם כְּבָשִׂים בְּנֵי־שָׁנָה אַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר תְּמִימִם יִהְיוּ
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 בחג הסכות, והוא אמרו יתעלה והקרבתם עולה, וזהו מוסף החג. (פינחס, תמידין ומוספין פ"י):
That is that He commanded to offer an additional sacrifice on the holiday of Sukkot. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "You shall offer a burnt-offering" (Numbers 29:13). And that is the additional offering of the holiday. (See Parashat Pinchas; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 10:3.)
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 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)
- 11Q19 (Temple Scroll) cols. 28-29 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Numbers Rabbah 21:24 expanded it homiletically
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 28 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.189-190 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.244-247 described it
The New Testament
- John 7:2, 37-39 reinterpreted it Jesus' words on the 'last and greatest day of the festival' play on the Sukkot water-libation imagery; the musaf sacrifices themselves are not addressed
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 Canaanite autumn festival cycle associating the storm god Baal's return from the underworld with the onset of seasonal rains, the West-Semitic religious backdrop against which the Israelite autumn harvest festival (Sukkot) developed Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Baal Cycle (KTU 1.1–1.6), particularly KTU 1.5–1.6 (Baal's death and resurrection as autumn rain-bringer) Smith and Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, 2 vols. (Brill, 1994, 2009)
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.