“ ‘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.
A woman shall not have sexual relations with an animal
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְאִשָּׁה לֹא־תַעֲמֹד לִפְנֵי בְהֵמָה לְרִבְעָהּ תֶּבֶל הוּא
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו מהביא הנשים הבהמות עליהן. והוא אמרו ואשה לא תעמוד לפני בהמה לרבעה תבל הוא. וזו גם כן מצוה בפני עצמו ואינה נכנסת במצוה שלפניה. כי לא בהיות איסור על הזכרים לבא על הבהמות נאסר לאשה להביא הבהמה עליה לולא האזהרה בזה מיוחדת. ובתחלת כריתות (דף ב') אמרו ל"ו כריתות יש בתורה ומנו אותם ומנו בכללם הבא על הבהמה והאשה המביאה עליה את הבהמה עם היות שם כולל ענינם מצות לא תעשה, והעובר על לאו זה חייב סקילה, ואם לא נחקרה העדות הרי היא בכרת אם היתה מזידה, ואם היתה שוגגת תקריב קרבן חטאת קבועה.
He prohibited us from having women engage in sexual relations with animals. And that is His saying, "And a woman shall not stand before a beast to mate with it" (Leviticus 18:23). And this is a separate commandment as well; and is not included in the commandment that precedes it. For it is not with the prohibition of males to have sexual intercourse with animals, that it is forbidden for a woman to have an animal have sexual intercourse with her - were it not for the specific prohibition about it. And at the beginning of Keritot (Keritot 2a), they said, "There are 36 [sins punished] with excision in the Torah," and tallied them. And among them, they tallied a man having sexual intercourse with an animal, and an animal having sexual intercourse with a woman (separately) - even though it was grouping content together as negative commandments (and yet it does not group these two). And one who transgresses this negative commandment is liable for stoning; and if the testimony is not ratified, she is surely [punished] with excision if she was volitional. But if she was inadvertent, she 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
- 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 Specialibus Legibus 3.43-50 read it more strictly
Josephus
- Ant. 3.274-275 affirmed 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 pig/dog) as capital/cultic offense; male-perpetrator only Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §199 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (1997)
- hittite laws bestiality (with cow/sheep); male-perpetrator only, with penalties varying across the relevant sections rather than uniformly capital — diverges from the Levitical extension to women Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§187-188 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (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.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Leviticus 20:16 and Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:4 prescribe death by stoning for a woman who has sexual contact with an animal; while modern law prohibits such acts, capital punishment for this offense violates the principle of proportionality in punishment.
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Article 6
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 6 limits capital punishment to the most serious crimes; the death penalty for bestiality falls outside the permissible scope of capital punishment under international human rights standards.
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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 female bestiality has not been enforceable within Jewish legal institutions for approximately two millennia, though it remains the biblical norm.