“ ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter. You shall not take her son’s daughter, or her daughter’s daughter, to uncover her nakedness. They are near kinswomen. It is wickedness.
Not to have sexual relations with a woman and her daughter
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עֶרְוַת אִשָּׁה וּבִתָּהּ לֹא תְגַלֵּה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מגלות ערות אשה ובתה. והוא אמרו יתברך ערות אשה ובתה לא תגלה. והעובר על לאו זה והוא שתהיה אחת מהן אשתו ויבעול האחרת חייב שריפה. ואם לא נחקרה העדות בכרת אם היה מזיד. ואם היה שוגג יקריב חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with a woman and her daughter. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "The nakedness of a woman and her daughter you shall not uncover" (Leviticus 18:17). And one who transgresses this negative commandment volitionally - and that is when one of them is his wife and he has sexual intercourse with the other - is liable for burning. But if the testimony was not ratified, it is with excision if it was volitional. And if he was inadvertent, he must sacrifice a fixed sin-offering.
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 burning (sereifah)
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)
- 11QTemple 66:11-17 The catalog describes this reception as: legal harmonization
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.20-25 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.274-275 affirmed it Restates the Lev 18 forbidden-union list generally rather than singling out the woman-and-her-daughter clause
The New Testament
- 1 Corinthians 5:1 The catalog describes this reception as: analogous application Paul condemns a man having his father's wife as porneia not even named among the gentiles; this is an analogous affinal-incest case in the Lev 18 orbit rather than a direct reception of the woman-and-her-daughter clause
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 cumulative sexual relations with mother, daughter, and sister conditioned on locale and status Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §191 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997); Hoffner, Laws of the Hittites (1997)
- hittite laws prohibition of relations with the wife's daughter (stepdaughter) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §195b Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997); Hoffner, Laws of the Hittites (1997)
- code of hammurabi father-in-law lying with son's bride, penalized by drowning Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §155 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.
Leviticus 20:14, applied by rabbinic law (Mishnah Sanhedrin 9:1) to a man who takes both a woman and her daughter, prescribes execution by burning; modern penal proportionality precludes capital punishment for sexual misconduct between adults, however morally condemned.
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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); judicial burning as a penalty for sexual relations with two women in a direct maternal line, however grave, exceeds the Article 6 limitation.
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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 at the end of the Second Temple era; the death penalty by burning for this offense has been de facto unenforceable for approximately two millennia.