“ ‘If a woman has a discharge, and her discharge in her flesh is blood, she shall be in her impurity seven days. Whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.
A menstruating woman (niddah) is ritually impure and shall follow the prescribed laws
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִשָּׁה כִּי־תִהְיֶה זָבָה דָּם יִהְיֶה זֹבָהּ בִּבְשָׂרָהּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תִּהְיֶה בְנִדָּתָהּ וְכָל־הַנֹּגֵעַ בָּהּ יִטְמָא עַד־הָעָרֶב
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.
- Recorded as practiced today
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
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding biblical only
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)
- 4Q272 (4QToharot) The catalog describes this reception as: purity stringency (fragmentary)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 48-50 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 17:8 expanded it homiletically
- Avot de-Rabbi Natan, version A, ch. 9 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.32-33 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Mark 5:25-34 reinterpreted it the hemorrhaging woman touches Jesus and is healed rather than transmitting impurity; narrative inversion of the contact-contamination logic of Lev 15:19ff
The Church Fathers
- Didascalia Apostolorum, Didascalia ch. 26 rejected it polemically
- Dionysius of Alexandria, Canonical Epistle to Basilides, canon 2 reinterpreted it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:222 carried a parallel, with divergence
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.
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Article 5 and Article 16(1)(c)
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The classification of normal menstruation as a source of communicable ritual impurity — a status imposed exclusively on women and governing marital access through the in-force niddah separation period — reinforces sex-based stereotypes about female bodies as polluting (CEDAW Article 5) and creates unequal conditions within marriage determined by the wife's biological cycle as legally construed by religious law (CEDAW Article 16(1)(c)).
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment imposes a religious-legal obligation exclusively on women by treating a universal female biological function as a source of ritual contamination requiring behavioral management; no structurally equivalent obligation is imposed on men for comparable physiological events, creating an asymmetric burden of religious law organized along sex lines.