“ ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother’s sister, for she is your mother’s near kinswoman.
Not to have sexual relations with one's mother's sister
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עֶרְוַת אֲחוֹת־אִמְּךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה כִּי־שְׁאֵר אִמְּךָ 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 האם. והוא אמרו ערות אחות אמך לא תגלה. והעובר על לאו זה במזיד חייב כרת, ובשוגג יקריב חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with a sister of the mother. And that is His saying, "The nakedness of your mother's sister you shall not uncover" (Leviticus 18:13). And one who transgresses this negative commandment volitionally is [punished] by excision. But [if] 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
- 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 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.20-28 affirmed it
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 enumerate parent-child and in-law prohibited pairs but contain no explicit maternal-aunt clause; the bilateral Levitical coverage of both paternal and maternal aunts (Lev 18:12-13) extends beyond the surviving Hittite enumeration Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§187-200 (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.