“ ‘You shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness, as long as she is impure by her uncleanness.
Not to have sexual relations with a menstruating woman
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאֶל־אִשָּׁה בְּנִדַּת טֻמְאָתָהּ לֹא תִקְרַב לְגַלּוֹת עֶרְוָתָהּ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו שלא לבוא על הנדה בעת טומאתה רוצה לומר כל השבעה ימים. והוא אמרו ואל אשה בנדת טומאתה לא תקרב כל זמן שלא תטבול אחר שבעה. והעובר על לאו זה במזיד חייב כרת, ובשוגג יקריב קרבן חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual intercourse with a menstruant during the period of her impurity - meaning to say, all of the seven days. And that is His saying, "To a woman, while in her menstrual impurity, you shall not approach to uncover her nakedness" (Leviticus 18:19). [That is] so long as she has not immersed [in a mikveh] after the seven [days]. And one who transgresses this negative commandment volitionally is liable for 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, with modification
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Not 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)
- 4Q266 (4QDamascus-a) purity regulations read it more strictly
- 11QTemple (11Q19) cols. 48-51 (general purity/exclusion regulations; menstrual relevance only indirect) The catalog describes this reception as: general purity context
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 17:8 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.32-33 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.261-264 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 2:222 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.
- middle assyrian laws Mesopotamian menstrual taboo is attested in ritual and incantation texts rather than the cuneiform law collections; the Middle Assyrian Laws do not legislate niddah-type separation Relationship to the parallel: shared theme n/a (no direct menstrual-separation provision in the law collection) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 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.
-
Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The commandment regulates sexual access to women during menstruation by defining the menstruating woman's body as ritually impure and therefore off-limits, embedding a gendered purity stigma onto a natural biological process; CEDAW Article 5 obligates states to eliminate social patterns and practices premised on the stereotyped inferiority of women or on sex-role stereotyping.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The prohibition applies exclusively because of the woman's biological state, creating a gender-specific legal disability grounded in female physiology; post-Enlightenment equality norms reject the legal inference of reduced moral or relational status from natural bodily processes unique to women.