He shall not multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away. He shall not greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.
The king shall not acquire an excessive number of wives
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא יַרְבֶּה־לּוֹ נָשִׁים וְלֹא יָסוּר לְבָבוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהיר המלך מהרבות נשים. והוא אמרו לא ירבה לו נשים. וגבול זה שלא יוסיף על שמונה עשרה נשים בכתובה וקדושין. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בשני מסנהדרין. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited the king from having many wives. And that is His saying, "he may not have many wives" (Deuteronomy 17:17). And the limit on this is that he not surpass eighteen wives with a contract (ketubah) and marriage (kiddushin). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the second [chapter] of Sanhedrin. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 3.)
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 prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: binding but inoperative
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)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 57:15-19 read it more strictly
- CD 4:20-5:2 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Sifre Deuteronomy, piska 159 (Finkelstein ed.), on Deut 17:17 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.223-224 affirmed it
- Ant. 8.190-198 The catalog describes this reception as: narrative expansion
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.
- hittite vassal treaties Hittite vassal treaties include clauses regulating the king's marriages, particularly to ensure succession loyalty and prevent rival alliances through foreign marriages — normalizing diplomatic polygamy as a tool of statecraft that the Deuteronomic restriction counters Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Marriage and succession stipulations (e.g., Treaty of Suppiluliuma with Shattiwaza; Treaty of Tudhaliya IV with Ulmi-Teshub) Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (SBL, 1999)
- code of hammurabi CH regulates the status of multiple wives and concubines as a normal feature of aristocratic marriage, with no limit on the number of wives a man of sufficient means may maintain — in contrast to the Deuteronomic restriction on royal polygamy Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§137-149 (marriage and divorce laws) 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
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment regulates the number of wives a king may accumulate, presupposing royal polygamy as a legitimate institution; CEDAW Article 16 requires that women and men have equal rights in marriage and family relations, which is incompatible with a system that treats wives as a quantitative resource subject to numerical caps rather than as equal marital partners.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment frames the restriction on wives as a safeguard against the king's religious loyalty rather than as a protection of the women concerned; the structural asymmetry — in which the king accumulates wives while women have no corresponding rights to multiple husbands — is incompatible with gender equality as a normative framework.