If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead shall not be married outside to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.
A childless widow shall not marry anyone other than her deceased husband's brother without chalitzah
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תִהְיֶה אֵשֶׁת־הַמֵּת הַחוּצָה לְאִישׁ זָר
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר שאר האנשים שלא לבא על היבמה והיא תחת זיקת יבמה. והוא אמרו לא תהיה אשת המת החוצה לאיש זר. והעובר על לאו זה לוקה. והתבארו משפטי מצוה זו ביבמות. (שם, שם):
He prohibited other men from having sexual intercourse with a levirate wife when she is tied to the bond of her levirate husband. And that is His saying, "the wife of the deceased shall not be married to a stranger, outside" (Deuteronomy 25:5). And one who transgresses this negative commandment is lashed; and the regulations of this commandment have been explained in Yevamot. (See Parashat Ki Tetzeh; Mishneh Torah, Divorce 9.)
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 case law — "if X, then Y"
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
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
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, with modification
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Reinterpreted
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.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Genesis Rabbah 85 expanded it homiletically
- Ruth Rabbah 7:7 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Spec. Leg. 3.27-29 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.254-256 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Matthew 22:23-28 The catalog describes this reception as: invoked Sadducean test-case invoking levirate succession of seven brothers; Synoptic parallels Mark 12:18-23, Luke 20:27-33
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 levirate succession of widow to brother, then father Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §193 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites (1997)
- middle assyrian laws fraternal/paternal obligation toward widowed or betrothed daughter-in-law (§§30, 33 levirate-proper; §43 betrothal-contingency on death of intended husband) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §§30, 33, 43 Roth, Law Collections 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.
The enumeration counts this as a structural duplicate of commandment #482 — Structural duplicate of #482 — both cite Rambam SHM Negative 357 (Deuteronomy 25:5) with identical halakhic content. #482 is the canonical placement, integrated into the dataset's Chinukh-ordered marriage-law cluster (positive/negative pairings around #469–#483). #510–#515 form an isolated SHM-ordered run inserted into an otherwise Chinukh-ordered span. See task #93..