“ ‘On the eighth day you shall have a solemn assembly. You shall do no regular work; but you shall offer a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, a pleasant aroma to Yahweh: one bull, one ram, seven male lambs a year old without defect;
To offer the additional offering on Shemini Atzeret
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי עֲצֶרֶת תִּהְיֶה לָכֶם כָּל־מְלֶאכֶת עֲבֹדָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ׃ וְהִקְרַבְתֶּם עֹלָה אִשֵּׁה רֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ לַיהוָה פַּר אֶחָד אַיִל אֶחָד כְּבָשִׂים בְּנֵי־שָׁנָה שִׁבְעָה 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 מוסף בשמיני של חג והוא מוסף שמיני חג העצרת. ומה שחייבו שנמנה מוסף זה בפני עצמו חלוק מכלל ימי הסכות, היות הנדרש אצלנו שמיני עצרת רגל בפני עצמו, וזה מבואר תכלית הבאור. (פינחס, תמידין ומוספין פ"י):
That is that He commanded to offer an additional sacrifice on the eighth day of the Holiday (Sukkot). And that is the additional offering of the eighth day holiday of Atzeret. And that which obligates us to count this additional offering separately - separate from all the days of Sukkot - it that we expound that the eighth day Atzeret is its own festival. And that is completely clear. (See Parashat Pinchas; Mishneh Torah, Daily Offerings and Additional Offerings 10.)
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 As the catalog records it: non applicable
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 reinterpreted it
Rabbinic aggadah
- b. Sukkah 55b expanded it homiletically
- Numbers Rabbah 21:24 expanded it homiletically
- Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 27 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.211-214 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.247 affirmed it
The New Testament
- John 7:37 reinterpreted it Whether 'the last, great day of the feast' (ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ μεγάλῃ τῆς ἑορτῆς) refers to Shemini Atzeret/the eighth day or to the seventh day of Sukkot is debated among commentators; on either reading the water-drawing imagery is christologically appropriated
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 multi-day festival sequence with concluding rites 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.