If its owner is with it, he shall not make it good. If it is a leased thing, it came for its lease.
A seducer must marry the woman he seduced if her father consents
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכִֽי־יְפַתֶּ֣ה אִ֗ישׁ בְּתוּלָ֛ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹא־אֹרָ֖שָׂה וְשָׁכַ֣ב עִמָּ֑הּ מָהֹ֛ר יִמְהָרֶ֥נָּה לּ֖וֹ לְאִשָּֽׁה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו בדין המפתה. והוא אמרו יתעלה וכי יפתה איש וגו'. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בשלישי ורביעי מכתובות. (ואלה המשפטים, נשים הלכות נערה בתולה פ"א):
That is that He commanded us about the law of the seducer. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "If a man seduces a virgin" (Exodus 22:15). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in the third and fourth [chapters] of Ketubot. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Virgin Maiden 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.
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
- A monetary penalty
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
- Restitution (tashlumin)
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, with modification
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 3.65-71 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.252 reinterpreted 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.
- middle assyrian laws compensation/marriage for intercourse with an unbetrothed virgin Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §55 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- middle assyrian laws consensual case: where the woman gave herself willingly, the father may treat his daughter as he pleases and the man's marriage liability is at the father's discretion Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §56 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi death for intercourse with another man's betrothed virgin (contrast: unbetrothed case unaddressed) Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §130 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- laws of eshnunna death for forcibly violating a woman whose bride-price had been delivered while she still resided in her father's house Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §26 Roth, Law Collections 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(1)(c) requires equal rights and responsibilities of spouses during marriage and at its dissolution; the get framework as derived from this commandment vests the formal initiation of divorce exclusively in the husband's act, with no corresponding wife-initiated instrument in the plain biblical text, producing the structural inequality that generates the agunah (chained wife) problem in contemporary practice.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment establishes a unilateral male-controlled dissolution mechanism with no legally equivalent female counterpart; the resulting asymmetry — in which the husband alone holds the instrument of release — remains a live gender-equality conflict in contemporary Orthodox and Conservative Jewish communities where the get is legally operative.