then his brother’s wife shall come to him in the presence of the elders, and loose his sandal from off his foot, and spit in his face. She shall answer and say, “So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.”
If levirate marriage is refused, to perform the ceremony of chalitzah (removing the shoe)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְחָלְצָה נַעֲלוֹ מֵעַל רַגְלוֹ וְיָרְקָה בְּפָנָיו וְעָנְתָה וְאָמְרָה כָּכָה יֵעָשֶׂה לָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יִבְנֶה אֶת־בֵּית אָחִיו
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להיות היבמה חולצת ליבמה אם לא ישאנה. והוא אמרו יתעלה וחלצה נעלו. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת יבמות. וכבר ידעת אמרם (יבמות ל"ט:) מצות יבום קודמת למצות חליצה, ולכן היא נקראת יבמות ואע"פ שהיא כוללת דיני היבום והחליצה בשוה. (כי תצא, נשים הלכות יבום וחליצה):
That is that He commanded us that a yevamah (levirate wife) release her yavam if he does not marry her. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "and she shall release his shoe" (Deuteronomy 25:9). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Yevamot. And you already know their saying (Yevamot 39b), "The commandment of yibum (levirate marriage) takes precedence over release." And that is why [the tractate] is called Yevamot, even though it includes the laws of levirate marriage and of release, equally. (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
- 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
- Ruth Rabbah 7:11 expanded it homiletically
Josephus
- Antiquities 4.254-256 paraphrased it
The New Testament
- Matthew 22:23-33 reinterpreted it Sadducean test-case invokes levirate succession (Deut 25:5-6) to deny resurrection; chalitzah not directly addressed but the institution is presupposed
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.
- middle assyrian laws levirate-type obligations of the deceased husband's household toward the widow/betrothed Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §§30, 43 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws successive marriage of a widow to the deceased husband's brother, then father Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §193 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.