“ ‘You shall not lie with any animal to defile yourself with it. No woman may give herself to an animal, to lie down with it: it is a perversion.
Not to have sexual relations with an animal
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּבְכָל־בְּהֵמָה לֹא־תִתֵּן שְׁכָבְתְּךָ לְטָמְאָה־בָהּ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו שלא לשכב עם הבהמות זכריהן ונקבותיהן. והוא אמרו יתעלה ובכל בהמה לא תתן שכבתך. והעובר על לאו זה במזיד חייב סקילה ואם לא יסקל הנה הוא בכרת, ואם היה שוגג יביא חטאת קבועה:
He prohibited us from sexual relations with animals - their males and their females. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "And with every beast do not give your lying" (Leviticus 18:23). And one who transgresses this negative commandment volitionally is liable for stoning; and if he is not stoned, he is surely [punished] with excision. 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 stoning (sekilah)
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
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 Spec. Leg. 3.43-50 rationalized it
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 bestiality with cattle and sheep punishable by death Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§187-188 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws bestiality with pig/dog a capital offense (with possibility of royal clemency, §199); with horse/mule not a capital offense but disqualifying for priestly office (§200a) — illustrates species-differentiation absent from the blanket Israelite prohibition Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§199, 200a Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 1997)
- egyptian negative confession deceased's denial of sexual transgression Relationship to the parallel: shared formulary Spell 125 Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1972)
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.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:4 prescribes death by stoning for bestiality; while modern law universally prohibits sexual acts with animals, it does not impose capital punishment, and the biblical-rabbinic sentence of death by stoning for this offense violates penal proportionality norms.
-
Article 6
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 6 limits capital punishment to the most serious crimes, defined in international jurisprudence as intentional killings; the death penalty for bestiality falls outside the permissible scope of capital punishment under international human rights law.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that capital jurisdiction lapsed with the dissolution of the Sanhedrin; the death penalty for bestiality has not been enforceable within Jewish legal institutions for approximately two millennia, though it remains the biblical norm.