Commandments · Positive commandments

To celebrate three pilgrim festivals each year by appearing at the Temple

#93 Positive commandment Exodus 23:14

The cited verse

The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)

שָׁלֹשׁ רְגָלִים תָּחֹג לִי בַּשָּׁנָה

Literary form: a flat, unconditional command

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 Kept as an ethical principle
  • Reform Kept as an ethical principle
  • Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
  • 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. 17-29 (festival calendar) read it more strictly
  • 4QMMT read it more strictly

Rabbinic aggadah

  • Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 27 expanded it homiletically

Philo of Alexandria

  • De Specialibus Legibus 1.68-70 rationalized it

Josephus

  • Antiquities 4.203-204 affirmed it

The New Testament

  • John 7:2-10 affirmed it Jesus depicted going up to Jerusalem for Sukkot (Festival of Tabernacles)
  • Acts 2:1 affirmed it Pentecost (Shavuot) pilgrimage gathering in Jerusalem
  • Luke 2:41-42 affirmed it annual Passover pilgrimage of Jesus' family

The Church Fathers

  • Eusebius, Demonstratio Evangelica (general supersessionist framing of Jewish festival/cult observance) treated it as abrogated

The Qur'an and hadith

  • Q 22:27-29 carried a parallel

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.

  • mesopotamian akitu festival Relationship to the parallel: shared theme general comparative reference (no section number asserted)
  • egyptian cult and festival texts Relationship to the parallel: shared theme general comparative reference (no section number asserted)

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.

The enumeration counts this as a structural duplicate of commandment #94 — Structural duplicate of #94 sharing collision_key chinuch:489. Independent reading of the three batch entries confirms that #93 and #94 articulate the same positive halakhic rule (appearing at the central sanctuary three times annually for the pilgrim festivals) drawn from parallel Pentateuchal formulations — the Covenant Code (Exod 23:14) and the Deuteronomic reformulation (Deut 16:16). See task #95..

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.