“ ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s brother. You shall not approach his wife. She is your aunt.
Not to have sexual relations with the wife of one's father's brother (paternal uncle's wife)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
עֶרְוַת אֲחִי־אָבִיךָ לֹא תְגַלֵּה אֶל־אִשְׁתּוֹ לֹא תִקְרָב דֹּדָתְךָ הִוא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מגלות ערות אשת אחי האב. והוא אמרו אל אשתו לא תקרב דודתך היא. והעובר על לאו זה במזיד חייב כרת, ובשוגג יביא חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with the wife of the father's brother. And that is His saying, "You shall not approach his wife, she is your aunt" (Leviticus 18:14). 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 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 3.12-28 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.274-275 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 4:23 carried a parallel, with divergence
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.
- code of hammurabi Hammurabi regulates affinal sexual access in the adjacent generation (father-in-law and son's bride, §§155-156; son and father's widow, §158), providing the closest Mesopotamian comparand cluster to the uncle's-wife prohibition of Lev 18:14; no law explicitly addresses the uncle's wife Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§155-158 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- hittite laws Hittite laws prohibit a range of in-law and consanguine sexual unions (father's wife, brother's wife, son's wife) but do not enumerate the uncle's-wife case, reflecting that the Levitical lateral-ascending affinal prohibition has no direct ANE parallel Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§189-200 (ḫurkel offenses) 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.