“ ‘He shall take a wife in her virginity.
The High Priest shall marry only a virgin
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְהוּא אִשָּׁה בִבְתוּלֶיהָ יִקָּח
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצווה כהן גדול שישא בתולה, והוא אמרו והוא אשה בבתוליה יקח. ובבאור אמרו (יבמות מ"ט) עושה היה רבי עקיבא ממזר אפילו מחייבי עשה, ובאור זה כשהיה כהן גדול בא על בלתי בתולה שהיא אסורה לו בעשה, שהשורש הזה אצלנו לאו הבא מכלל עשה עשה. והנה כבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו ביבמות וקידושין וכתובות. (אמור, קדושה הלכות אסורי ביאה פי"ז):
That is that He commanded a high priest to marry a virgin. And that is His saying, "He shall marry a woman who is a virgin." And they said in the explanation (Ketuvot 30a), "Rabbi Akiva would designate as a mamzer even [a child resulting from the union of] those prohibited by a positive commandment." And the explanation of this is that it is when a high priest would have sexual intercourse with someone who is not a virgin - about which he is prohibited by a positive commandment. For the principle with us is that a negative commandment that is derived from a positive commandment is [also] a positive commandment. And behold the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Yevamot, in Kiddushin and in Ketuvot. (See Parashat Emor; Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 17.)
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.
- Requires a standing Temple
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
- Conservative Not binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Not 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)
- 11QTemple (11Q19) 57:15-19 (Law of the King; royal endogamy/monogamy, adduced as structurally analogous to priestly marriage restriction rather than directly treating the High Priest) read it more strictly
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.101-111 (esp. 1.110, on the High Priest marrying a virgin) rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.276-277 (priestly marriage purity, incl. High Priest) 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.
- code of hammurabi marriage and property regulations for nadītu and šugītu cultic women whose status as 'dedicated' personnel imposed restrictions on their marital and reproductive roles, structurally analogous to the Israelite High Priest's requirement to marry only an unattached virgin Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§178-182 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.
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Article 16
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
CEDAW Article 16 guarantees equal rights in all matters of marriage without discrimination; the commandment requires the most senior religious official to marry exclusively a woman defined by her virgin status, institutionalising the assessment of women's suitability for the highest-status marriage in the community on the basis of sexual history — a criterion with no male equivalent.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The requirement that the High Priest take only a virgin wife enshrines in religious law the principle that a woman's value as a marriage partner is contingent on her sexual history, applying a standard of eligibility to women that is wholly absent for men, in tension with post-Enlightenment gender-equality norms.