They shall fine him one hundred shekels of silver, and give them to the father of the young lady, because he has given a bad name to a virgin of Israel. She shall be his wife. He may not put her away all his days.
A man who has defamed his wife shall not divorce her
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא־יוּכַל לְשַׁלְּחָהּ כָּל־יָמָיו
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר מוציא שם רע שלא לגרש את אשתו והוא אמרו לא יוכל לשלחה כל ימיו, וזה הלאו גם כן קדמו עשה, והוא אמרו ולו תהיה לאשה. ודינו בגרושין לענין המלקות כדין האונס כמו שהתבאר בסוף מכות ובשלישי וברביעי מכתובות. (שם, שם):
He prohibited one who puts out a bad name [upon his wife] from divorcing [her]. And that is His saying, "he shall not be able to send her away all of his days" (Deuteronomy 22:19). And this negative commandment was also preceded by a positive commandment; and that is His saying, "and to him shall she be as a wife." And the law for him with divorce, concerning lashes, is the same as the law for the rapist, as has been explained at the end of Makkot and in the third and fourth [chapters] of Ketuvot. (See Parashat Ki Tetzeh; Mishneh Torah, Virgin Maiden 3.)
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.
No applicability flags are recorded for this commandment.
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
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 Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Not binding
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 3.79-82 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.246-248 expanded it homiletically
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 24:4-9 carried a thematic 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.
- code of hammurabi investigation of accused wife before determining marital status Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §142 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi slander of a married woman/priestess punished by flogging and shaving the hair (§127); the River Ordeal for a wife accused of infidelity by finger-pointing without being caught in the act (§132) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§127, 132 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor 2nd ed. (1997)
- middle assyrian laws defloration of unbetrothed virgins and consequent obligations Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence A §§55-56 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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Article 16
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
CEDAW Article 16 guarantees equal rights for men and women in all matters relating to marriage, including the right to freely dissolve a marriage; the commandment permanently removes the husband's right to divorce as a penalty for defamation, but the underlying case law (Deuteronomy 22:13–19) rests on a virginity-proof regime that subjects only the woman's body to public judicial inspection, creating a gender-asymmetric evidentiary process.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The law's protective function operates within a framework that defines a woman's social and economic worth by her virginity status; the entire case law — the virginity tokens, the public adjudication, the parental presentation of evidence — treats female sexual history as a commodity subject to legal scrutiny in a manner with no male equivalent.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The prescribed penalty of thirty-nine lashes for divorcing the defamed wife employs corporal punishment, which modern criminal law universally prohibits as cruel and degrading.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; flogging as the enforcement mechanism constitutes degrading 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 the lashes sanction requires a functioning Sanhedrin, which lapsed with the Second Temple's destruction; enforcement of the corporal penalty is suspended in practice, and the commandment is recorded as not in force today.
The enumeration counts this as a structural duplicate of commandment #478 — Structural duplicate of #478 — both cite Rambam SHM Negative 359 (Deuteronomy 22:19) with identical halakhic content. #478 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..