“ ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, nor the nakedness of your mother: she is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness.
Not to have sexual relations with one's mother
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עֶרְוַת אָבִיךָ וְעֶרְוַת אִמְּךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה אִמְּךָ הִוא לֹא תְגַלֶּה עֶרְוָתָהּ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מגלות ערות אם. והוא אמרו ערות אמך לא תגלה וגו', והעובר על לאו זה בכרת וכשהעידו עליו עדים יסקל אם היה מזיד ואם היה שוגג יקריב קרבן חטאת קבועה. (מכאן עד מצוה סי' שנ"ב תמצא כל העריות הללו באחרי מות, קדושה הלכות אסורי ביאה בארבעה פרקים הראשונים):
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with the mother. And that is His saying, "and the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover" (Leviticus 18:7). And one who transgresses this negative commandment is [punished] with excision. And when witnesses testify against him, he is stoned if it was volitional. But if it was unintentional, he must sacrifice a fixed sin-offering. (From here until [Negative] Commandment 352, you will find all of the sexual prohibitions which are in Parashat Acharei Mot, see there; also see Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 1-4.)
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.
- 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
- Death by stoning (sekilah)
At the hands of Heaven
- Karet — being 'cut off'
Ritual remedy
- A sin-offering (ḥatat)
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
- Reform As the catalog records it: affirmed
- Reconstructionist As the catalog records it: affirmed
- 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.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- CD 5:7-11 The catalog describes this reception as: expansive analogical extension CD 5:7-11 does not treat the mother prohibition directly but extends the Lev 18 incest logic analogically to forbid uncle-niece marriage, reasoning from the female-relative prohibitions
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.12-14 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.274-275 affirmed it Josephus's paraphrase of the Levitical sexual-prohibition list is the relevant locus; the precise incest enumeration sits within this section
The New Testament
- 1 Corinthians 5:1 affirmed it Paul condemns a man having his father's wife as porneia 'not even named among the gentiles,' echoing the Lev 18 catalogue and its foreign-depravity framing
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:23 carried a parallel
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 consanguine incest prohibition (mother, daughter, son) classified as ḫurkel ('unpermitted sexual pairing') Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §189 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997); Hoffner, Laws of the Hittites (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.