If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead shall not be married outside to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.
A man shall marry his deceased brother's childless widow (levirate marriage / yibum)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
יְבָמָהּ יָבֹא עָלֶיהָ וּלְקָחָהּ לוֹ לְאִשָּׁה וְיִבְּמָהּ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להיות היבם נושא את אשת אחיו כשמת ולא הניח זרע. והוא אמרו יתעלה יבמה יבא עליה. וכבר התבארו דיני מצוה זו במסכת יבמות. (כי תצא, נשים הלכות יבום וחליצה):
That is that He commanded us that a yavam (levirate husband) marry the wife of his brother when [the latter] dies without leaving offspring. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "her yavam will have intercourse with her" (Deuteronomy 25:5). And the laws of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Yevamot. (See Parashat Ki Tetzei; Mishneh Torah, Levirate Marriage and Release.)
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.
- 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 Not binding
- Karaite Contested
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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 85 expanded it homiletically
- Ruth Rabbah 7 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Ant. 4.254-256 The catalog describes this reception as: paraphrased affirmed
The New Testament
- Matthew 22:23-33 The catalog describes this reception as: invoked Sadducees deploy the levirate institution as a hypothetical test-case to challenge resurrection; parallels Mark 12:18-27, Luke 20:27-40
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 laws levirate obligation extending to father and brother of the deceased Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §193 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- middle assyrian laws transfer of widow within the patrilineal household Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §§30, 33, 43 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (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 direct contradiction.
CEDAW Article 16 guarantees women the same right as men to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent; levirate marriage in its biblical plain reading obligates the widow to marry her brother-in-law without her consent being the operative legal consideration, directly contradicting this requirement.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The yibum institution treats the widow as a resource to be transferred within the patrilineage to preserve the deceased brother's name and property line, without according her decision-making primacy in the selection of a new spouse.
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Article 23
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 23(3) requires free and full consent of the intending spouses as a prerequisite for marriage; the levirate obligation as biblically formulated prescribes remarriage of the widow to her brother-in-law as the default outcome without her affirmative consent as the primary trigger.