“But the vow of a widow, or of her who is divorced, everything with which she has bound her soul shall stand against her.
A husband or father may annul the vow of a wife or daughter under specified conditions
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִם־הֵנִיא אָבִיהָ אֹתָהּ בְּיוֹם שָׁמְעוֹ כָּל־נְדָרֶיהָ וֶאֱסָרֶיהָ אֲשֶׁר־אָסְרָה עַל־נַפְשָׁהּ לֹא יָקוּם
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.
- 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, with modification
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Not binding
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.24-25 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.232-234 (cluster; precise reference uncertain) paraphrased it
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.
- code of hammurabi restriction of married women's independent property/contractual agency within patriarchal household Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§137-143 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi restrictions on married women's independent property and contractual rights within the patriarchal household — comparative legal context for Numbers 30's gendered vow-annulment framework Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§137-143 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- middle assyrian laws patriarchal limits on women's independent property and household-legal standing, providing comparative ANE context for Numbers 30's gendered vow-annulment framework Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Tablet A §36 (widow's standing and married woman's independent property capacity under household authority) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 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 16 (equality in marriage and family law); Article 2 (obligation to eliminate discrimination)
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment vests in male household heads — fathers over daughters in the parental home, husbands over wives — the unilateral legal authority to void a woman's binding religious commitment solely on the basis of her gender and domestic status. CEDAW Article 16 requires equal rights and responsibilities of spouses in all matters of family life; the asymmetric vow-annulment power, which has no reciprocal female counterpart, directly contradicts this equal-rights norm.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Numbers 30 constructs a two-tier system of legal personality in which a woman's solemn religious speech-act is legally subordinate to the overriding authority of her male guardian, while men's vows are never subject to analogous female override. This structural inequality in religious and legal agency — predicated solely on gender and marital status — is incompatible with the post-Enlightenment principle that legal capacity may not be differentiated by sex.