“ ‘If a woman has a discharge of her blood many days not in the time of her period, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her period, all the days of the discharge of her uncleanness shall be as in the days of her period. She is unclean.
A woman with an irregular discharge (zavah) shall observe the prescribed impurity laws
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִשָּׁה כִּי־יָזוּב זוֹב דָּמָהּ יָמִים רַבִּים בְּלֹא עֶת־נִדָּתָהּ אוֹ כִי־תָזוּב עַל־נִדָּתָהּ כָּל־יְמֵי זוֹב טֻמְאָתָהּ כִּימֵי נִדָּתָהּ תִּהְיֶה טְמֵאָה הִוא
Literary form: a case law — "if X, then Y"
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
- A sin-offering (ḥatat)
- A burnt-offering (olah)
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 Binding, with modification
- 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)
- 4Q272 (4QDamascusᶠ) frag. 1 ii read it more strictly
- 4Q266 (4QDᵃ) 6 ii The catalog describes this reception as: stringent reinterpretation (treats the broader discharge/niddah purity complex rather than the zāvah in isolation)
Josephus
- Ant. 3.261-273 affirmed it Josephus summarizes the bodily-discharge purity rules of Lev 15 in passing within his digest of Mosaic purity legislation, without isolating the zāvah as a distinct case
The New Testament
- Mark 5:25-34 reinterpreted it The twelve-year hemorrhaging woman is a chronic zāvah; the healing narrative presupposes the Levitical impurity framework and dramatizes restoration to communal participation
- Matthew 9:20-22 reinterpreted it Parallel pericope
- Luke 8:43-48 reinterpreted it Parallel pericope; the Lukan redaction underscores the prior failure of medical treatment before the healing
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:222 carried a parallel
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
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment classifies irregular female genital discharge as a source of communicable ritual impurity whose management is imposed exclusively on women, perpetuating a normative framework in which female reproductive biology is construed as socially hazardous and requiring behavioral containment — a pattern that CEDAW Article 5 identifies as a stereotyped sex role to be eliminated.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
Although the zāvah framework is structurally parallel to the male zāv, the practical and historical weight of the zavah laws falls entirely on women: rabbinic tradition collapsed the niddah/zavah distinction through the ḥumra de-Rabbi Zera, extending the more onerous zavah protocols to all menstruating women, thereby imposing a disproportionate ongoing religious burden on women traceable to this commandment.