You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at evening.
To slaughter the Passover lamb on the fourteenth of Nisan
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהָיָה לָכֶם לְמִשְׁמֶרֶת עַד אַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר יוֹם לַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה וְשָׁחֲטוּ אֹתוֹ כֹּל קְהַל עֲדַת־יִשְׂרָאֵל בֵּין הָעַרְבָּיִם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשחוט שה הפסח ביום ארבעה עשר בניסן בין הערבים. ומי שעובר על צווי זה ולא יקריבהו בזמנו חייב כרת בין איש בין אשה. וכבר התבאר בגמרא (פסחים צ"א) שפסח ראשון מצוה לנשים ודוחה את השבת, כלומר הקרבתו בארבעה עשר שחל להיות בשבת כמו כל איש מישראל, ולשון התורה בחיוב כרת הוא אמרו וחדל לעשות הפסח ונכרתה הנפש ההיא. ובתחלת כריתות (דף ב') כשמנו מצות שיתחייב העובר עליהן כרת והם כולם לא תעשה אמר והפסח והמילה במצות עשה. וכבר זכרנו זה בהקדמה. וכבר התבארה מצוה זו בפסחים (בא אל פרעה, הלכות קרבן פסח פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to slaughter the Pesach-offering on the fourteenth of Nissan in the afternoon. And one who transgresses this command and does not sacrifice it in its time is liable for excision - whether it is a man or a woman. And it has already been explained in the Gemara (Pesachim 91b) that the first Pesach is a commandment [also] for women and that it pushes off the Shabbat. That means to say, its sacrifice must be on the fourteenth [even when it] comes out on a Shabbat, [for women] - just like for every Jewish man. And the Torah's language about the liability for excision is His saying, "and refrains from offering the Pesach-offering, that person shall be cut off" (Numbers 9:13). And at the beginning of Keritot (Keritot 2a) when it lists the commandments for which one who transgresses them becomes liable for excision - and they are all negative commandments - it says, "And the Pesach-offering and circumcision, among the positive commandments." And we already mentioned this in the introduction (Sefer HaMitzvot, Shorashim 14). And this commandment has already been explained in Pesachim. (See Parashat Bo; Mishneh Torah, Paschal Offering 1.)
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
- Karet — being 'cut off'
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
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)
- Jubilees 49:1–23 (attested at Qumran, 4Q216–4Q228) read it more strictly
- 11QTemple (11Q19) col. XVII:6–9 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Pisḥa 5 expanded it homiletically
- Exodus Rabbah 17:3 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.145-149 rationalized it
- De Vita Mosis 2.224-225 read it allegorically
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.248-249 affirmed it
- Jewish War 6.423-427 affirmed it
The New Testament
- 1 Corinthians 5:7 read it spiritually Christ as the slaughtered paschal lamb
- John 19:14, 19:36 reinterpreted it crucifixion timed to pesach slaughter; 'no bone broken' applied to Jesus
- Mark 14:12 affirmed it narrates the slaughtering of the pesach on the customary day
The Church Fathers
- Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha read it spiritually
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 40 read it spiritually
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.
- hittite ritual texts blood and substitute-animal rites applied to doorways and thresholds to ward off destructive forces, the closest ANE structural parallel to the Israelite apotropaic doorpost blood application in Exodus 12:7 Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Hittite substitute-animal and threshold protection rituals (Ambazzi, Ashella ritual texts from Boğazköy archive) Wright, The Disposal of Impurity: Elimination Rites in the Bible and in Hittite and Mesopotamian Literature (SBLDS 101, 1987), pp. 48-74; Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 1997)
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.