He shall not marry a widow, or one divorced, or a woman who has been defiled, or a prostitute. He shall take a virgin of his own people as a wife.
The High Priest shall not take a divorced woman as a wife
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אַלְמָנָה וּגְרוּשָׁה וַחֲלָלָה זֹנָה אֶת־אֵלֶּה לֹא יִקָּח
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהיר הכהן שלא יקח גרושה, והוא אמרו ואשה גרושה מאישה לא יקחו. וכל זמן שיבא עליה חייב מלקות. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited a priest - that he not take (marry) a divorcee. And that is His saying, "and they shall not take a woman divorced from her husband" (Leviticus 21:7). And each time he has sexual relations with her, he is lashed. (See Parashat Emor; Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Intercourse 17-19.)
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
- 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
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Position uncertain
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)
- CD 4:20-5:2 (Damascus Document, on marital purity broadly — addresses 'nets of Belial' including divorce/remarriage, not specifically the High Priest's prohibition) The catalog describes this reception as: tangential/stringent reinterpretation
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.101-111 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.276-277 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 divorce settlement provisions in Mesopotamian law that protected divorced women's economic rights and permitted them to remarry freely, contrasting with the Israelite priestly system that permanently excludes a divorced woman from marrying a priest Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§137-143 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- middle assyrian laws Middle Assyrian provisions regulating the divorced woman's remarriage and status, attesting an ANE framework where divorce did not permanently bar remarriage into cultic or elite households Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Tablet A §§36-38 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 requires equal rights for men and women in all matters of marriage; the prohibition permanently disqualifies a divorced woman from marrying a kohen solely on the basis of her marital history, applying a restrictive eligibility criterion to women that has no male analogue in priestly marriage law.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The gerushah's perpetual exclusion from priestly marriage encodes in religious law a permanent mark of reduced marriage eligibility on account of prior divorce, a status-classification that applies exclusively to women and reflects a patriarchal purity logic irreconcilable with modern gender-equality norms.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The prescribed penalty of thirty-nine lashes for a kohen who marries a divorcée 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 flogging sanction requires a functioning Sanhedrin, which lapsed with the Second Temple's destruction; enforcement of the corporal penalty is suspended in practice, though this prohibition remains actively applied in Orthodox communities through rabbinical refusal to officiate at kohen-divorcée marriages.