“ ‘They shall not marry a woman who is a prostitute, or profane. A priest shall not marry a woman divorced from her husband; for he is holy to his God.
A regular priest shall not marry a harlot
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אִשָּׁה זֹנָה וַחֲלָלָה לֹא יִקָּחוּ וְאִשָּׁה גְּרוּשָׁה מֵאִישָׁהּ לֹא יִקָּחוּ
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.
- 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 Rejected
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite Position not recorded
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 5:6-7 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- b. Megillah 14b expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.101-104 affirmed 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.
- middle assyrian laws regulations restricting the marriage and social mobility of women of irregular or non-household status, governing who may be veiled and who is excluded from respectable marital arrangements Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet A §§40-41 Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- hittite laws regulations governing successive/levirate-type marriage among kin and the legitimacy of unions involving slaves, addressing permissible marital arrangements rather than cultic-personnel restrictions Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§193-194 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 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 direct contradiction.
CEDAW Article 16 guarantees the same right to enter marriage without discrimination based on status; the prohibition bars kohanim from marrying women categorized as zonah — a status that the rabbinic expansion extends to female converts and freed bondwomen regardless of personal conduct, making the woman's origin and prior associations, not the man's, the disqualifying criterion.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The prohibition imposes marriage restrictions that operate entirely on the woman's pre-marital sexual history or social category, with no parallel restriction on the kohen's own prior sexual conduct, embodying a double standard rooted in patriarchal control of female sexuality.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Violation of the priestly marriage restriction carries thirty-nine lashes (malkot); no post-Enlightenment legal system treats a personal choice of marriage partner as a corporally punishable offense.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment; inflicting thirty-nine lashes for contracting a marriage falls within that prohibition.
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rabbinic tradition
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that corporal punishment (malkot) requires a functioning Sanhedrin; with the Sanhedrin's dissolution the lashes sanction is de facto suspended, though the marriage prohibition itself remains de jure binding in Orthodox communities.