Mitzvah #81

Mitzvah (plural mitzvot) is the ordinary Hebrew word for a commandment — a binding directive issued by an authority, and in the Old Testament overwhelmingly a directive issued by God. It appears both for a single specific instruction and, in the plural, for the whole collected body of God’s commands to Israel, often paired with related words such as “statutes” and “judgments” to describe the law as a unified whole.

Biblical Usage

At Sinai, God gives Moses “tables of stone, and a law, and commandments” for the people (Exodus 24:12), and Moses is told to relay “all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments” so Israel can be taught to keep them (Deuteronomy 5:31). Deuteronomy 6 opens by naming “the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them,” tying obedience to the promised land and adding that keeping them is meant to produce reverence for God across generations (Deuteronomy 6:1-2).

Later Jewish tradition counted 613 distinct mitzvot in the Torah, divided into positive commands (“thou shalt”) and negative prohibitions (“thou shalt not”) — a rabbinic enumeration developed over centuries rather than a number stated anywhere in the biblical text itself, but one that shaped how mitzvah came to be used in everyday Jewish speech for any religious duty or good deed.

Theological Significance

In the Torah’s own framing, mitzvot are not a means of earning God’s favor but a response to it — Israel is first redeemed out of Egypt and only then given commandments to keep as the terms of an already-established covenant relationship. That sequence, obedience following deliverance rather than purchasing it, is part of what later New Testament writers assume when they distinguish law-keeping from the basis of salvation while still treating God’s commandments as binding.