“ ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s sister. She is your father’s near kinswoman.
Not to have sexual relations with one's father's sister
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עֶרְוַת אֲחוֹת־אָבִיךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה שְׁאֵר אָבִיךָ הִוא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מגלות ערות אחות האב. והוא אמרו יתברך ערות אחות אביך לא תגלה. והעובר על לאו זה במזיד חייב כרת, ובשוגג יביא חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with a sister of the father. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "The nakedness of your father's sister you shall not uncover" (Leviticus 18:12). And one who transgresses this negative commandment volitionally is [punished] by excision. But [if] 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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Binding
- Reconstructionist Binding
- 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: analogical extension (the consanguinity logic underlying the aunt prohibition is extended to forbid uncle niece unions)
- 11QTa (Temple Scroll) 66:15-17 carried a parallel
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.20-25 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.274-275 The catalog describes this reception as: affirmed (within the general incest catalogue; not isolable to the aunt case)
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 Hittite incest/ḫurkel provisions cover parent-child, stepmother, in-law, and sibling-cluster cases but contain no explicit paternal-aunt prohibition, illustrating that the Levitical extension to aunts is an Israelite innovation within a shared ANE concern for consanguine prohibited pairings Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§189-195 (ḫurkel cluster) Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 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.