“ ‘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's daughter
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אֶת־בַּת־בְּנָהּ וְאֶת־בַּת־בִּתָּהּ לֹא תִקַּח לְגַלּוֹת עֶרְוָתָהּ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מגלות ערות אשה ובת בתה, והוא אמרו יתעלה ואת בת בתה. והיא בכרת ובשריפה אם היה מזיד, ובשוגג יביא חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with a woman and her daughter's daughter. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "the daughter of her daughter" (Leviticus 18:17). And this is [punished] by excision and burning if he was volitional. But if he was inadvertent, he must bring 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)
- CD 5:7-11 The catalog describes this reception as: stringent expansion via a fortiori (niece marriage prohibition)
- 11QTemple 66:11-17 The catalog describes this reception as: stringent legal expansion
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.12-28 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.274-275 The catalog describes this reception as: affirmed (general Levitical incest framework, not subcase specific)
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 discrete prohibited sexual unions within a household/affinal relations (not a systematic affinal grid) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §195 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites (1997)
- code of hammurabi father-daughter consanguineal incest case (contrasts with the affinal grid approach of Lev 18:17) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §154 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.