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 harlot 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 זונה. והוא אמרו אשה זונה וחללה לא יקחו וכל זמן שיבא עליה חייב מלקות. (אמור אל הכהנים, קדושה הלכות איסורי ביאה פרק י"ז י"ח י"ט):
That He prohibited a priest from taking (marrying) a zonah (a woman who had sexual relations with someone forbidden for any Israelite to marry). And that is His saying, "They shall not take a woman that is a zonah or desecrated" (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.
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
- Conservative Binding, with modification
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- 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 1.101-104 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 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 regulations governing the inheritance, dowry, and marital arrangements of dedicated cultic women (nadītu and related classes), whose consecrated status entailed restrictions on marriage and childbearing; offers a comparative case of the legal management of cultic women's sexual/marital status, though the configurations differ markedly from the Israelite zonah/ḥalalah categories Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§178-182 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- middle assyrian laws veiling regulations that distinguish married women, concubines, harlots (harimtu), and qadiltu women by their required social markers, attesting to the Assyrian legal taxonomy of female sexual status that provides comparative background to the priestly zonah category Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet A §40 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.
-
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 woman categorised as a zonah — defined by Maimonides to encompass any woman who has had sexual relations with a man she is forbidden to marry, far beyond commercial sex work — from marrying a priest, imposing a lifetime marriage exclusion based on female sexual history with no male equivalent.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The zonah classification as extended in rabbinic law brands women with a permanent marital disability on account of their sexual history while imposing no analogous restriction on male priests who have had illicit sexual relations; the asymmetry encodes in religious law a gendered double standard that post-Enlightenment equality norms reject.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The prescribed penalty of thirty-nine lashes for a kohen who marries a zonah employs corporal punishment, which modern criminal law universally prohibits as cruel and degrading.
-
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.
-
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; the commandment is recorded as not in force today, and enforcement of the corporal penalty is suspended in practice.