“Speak to the children of Israel, saying, ‘If a woman conceives, and bears a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of her monthly period she shall be unclean.
A woman after childbirth shall observe the prescribed impurity laws
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אִשָּׁה כִּי תַזְרִיעַ וְיָלְדָה זָכָר וְטָמְאָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים כִּימֵי נִדַּת דְּוֹתָהּ תִּטְמָא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו שתקריב כל יולדת קרבן והוא כבש בן שנתו לעולה ובן יונה או תור לחטאת ואם היתה עניה שתקריב שתי תורים או שני בני יונה אחד לחטאת ואחד לעולה. והיא גם כן מחוסרת כפרה עד שתקריב אותם כמו שאמר ובמלאת ימי טהרה לבן או לבת תביא כבש בן שנתו לעולה ובן יונה או תור וגו'. (אשה כי תזריע, מחוסרי כפרה פ"א):
That is that He commanded us that any woman after childbirth offer a sacrifice - and that is a one-year old lamb as a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtledove as a sin-offering. But if she was poor, she should offer two turtledoves or two young pigeons - one for a sin-offering and one for a burnt-offering. And she is also lacking [full] atonement until she sacrifices them, as He said, "On the completion of her period of purification, for either son or daughter, she shall bring a one-year old lamb for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or a turtledove for a sin-offering, etc." (Leviticus 12:6). (See Parashat Tazria; Mishneh Torah, Offerings for Those with Incomplete Atonement 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 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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- 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)
- 4Q266 (4QDamascusᵃ) frg. 6 col. ii The catalog describes this reception as: halakhic elaboration (treats menstrual/discharge and related female purity generally; postpartum application is inferential rather than explicit)
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 14 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 3.269 affirmed it Josephus paraphrases the Levitical purification durations after childbirth within his summary of the purity legislation
The New Testament
- Luke 2:22-24 affirmed it Mary brings the poor person's offering of two birds per Lev 12:8, presented as observant fulfillment
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 incantation series post-partum restriction and purification customs attested in Mesopotamian ritual/incantation rather than law-code material; no codified statute exists in Roth's Law Collections, so the parallel is to ritual literature rather than to a legal corpus Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Mesopotamian birth and postpartum incantation/ritual material (no canonical series-section precisely parallel); cf. Stol, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible (2000) for the broader corpus Stol, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible: Its Mediterranean Setting (Brill/Styx, 2000); cf. Reiner, Šurpu (AfO Beiheft 11, 1958) for related purification framework
- hittite ritual texts Hittite ritual texts prescribe postpartum restrictions on women's access to cultic space and purification procedures after childbirth, sharing the structural concern with the impurity-generating potential of parturition but without the fixed-duration asymmetry or sacrificial-obligation framework of the Israelite system Relationship to the parallel: shared theme General Hittite ritual corpus on postpartum purification (KBo 17.62-63); no single Hittite Laws section number precisely parallel 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.
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Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment classifies childbirth — a female biological function — as generating ritual impurity, imposing behavioral restrictions and sacrificial obligations on women solely on account of their reproductive role; the framework treats the female body as a source of contamination requiring post-partum management, a social pattern that CEDAW Article 5 characterizes as a stereotyped conception of women's roles to be modified.
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Article 26
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The explicit doubling of the impurity and purification period for a female child (eighty days) versus a male child (forty days) enshrines a sex-based distinction in law that differentiates the religious-legal consequences of childbirth based on the infant's sex; ICCPR Article 26 prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex and mandates equal and effective protection of the law.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment imposes postpartum restrictions and sacrificial obligations exclusively on women and compounds the asymmetry by prescribing longer periods when a female child is born, treating the birth of a daughter as more contaminating than the birth of a son — a structural sex-based distinction incompatible with modern gender-equality norms.