“ ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife. It is your father’s nakedness.
Not to have sexual relations with one's father's wife (stepmother)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עֶרְוַת אֵשֶׁת־אָבִיךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה עֶרְוַת אָבִיךָ הִוא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר מגלות ערות אשת אב. והוא אמרו ערות אשת אביך לא תגלה, והעובר על לאו זה בכרת, וכשהעידו בו עדים יסקל אם היה מזיד ואם היה שוגג מביא חטאת קבועה. הנה התבאר לך שהבא על אמו חייב עליה משום אשת אב בין בחיי אביו בין לאחר מיתת אביו כמו שהתבאר בסנהדרין:
He prohibited sexual intercourse with the father's wife. And that is His saying, "The nakedness of your father's wife you shall not uncover" (Leviticus 18:8). 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 inadvertent, he must bring a fixed sin-offering. Behold it has been made clear to you that one who has sexual intercourse with his mother is [also] liable on account of [her being] his father's wife - whether during or after the lifetime of his father, as it is explained in Sanhedrin (Sanhedrin 54a).
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- 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: stringent incest law application (general; addresses forbidden unions and incest reasoning rather than the father's wife rule specifically)
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 98:4 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.20-21 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.274-275 affirmed it Within Josephus's paraphrase of the Levitical sexual prohibitions; exact paragraph delimitation approximate
The New Testament
- 1 Corinthians 5:1 The catalog describes this reception as: applied Paul invokes the Levitical norm against a man cohabiting with his father's wife as beyond even Gentile practice
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:22 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 stepmother incest; death while father alive, marriage permitted after father's death Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §190 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi disinheritance for relations with stepmother (who has borne children) after father's death Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §158 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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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Rabbinic law (Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:4; Sanhedrin 53a) prescribes execution by stoning for sexual relations with one's stepmother; modern penal proportionality precludes capital punishment for incest between adults.
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Article 6
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 6(2) restricts the death penalty to the most serious crimes (typically intentional homicide); imposing capital punishment for sexual misconduct between adults, however grave, exceeds what Article 6 permits.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that capital jurisdiction lapsed with the cessation of ordained Sanhedrin proceedings, which have not functioned since the Second Temple era; the death penalty for this offense remains de jure but has not been administered for approximately two millennia.