“ ‘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 profaned woman (chalalah)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
אִשָּׁה זֹנָה וַחֲלָלָה 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 חללה. והוא אמרו וחללה לא יקחו. וכל זמן שיבא עליה חייב מלקות. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited a priest - that he not take (marry) a desecrated woman. And that is His saying, "They shall not take a woman that is 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 Binding, with modification
- Reform Rejected
- Reconstructionist Rejected
- Karaite As the catalog records it: not applicable
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; 4QMMT B 75-82 (general priestly-marriage stringency and endogamy; no chalalah-specific ruling) The catalog describes this reception as: stringent reinterpretation (general)
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.101-111 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.276-277 affirmed it
- Contra Apionem 1.31-36 The catalog describes this reception as: affirmed (general priestly genealogical purity; not chalalah specific)
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.
- hittite laws regulations governing successive/levirate-type marriage among kin and the legitimacy of unions involving persons of differing household status; the broader Hittite framework shares the concern that certain unions produce offspring of diminished or altered legal standing, though without linking this to hereditary cultic disqualification Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§193-194 Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 1997)
- middle assyrian laws regulations defining women of irregular or non-household social standing — who may be veiled, who is barred from certain relational statuses — illustrating ANE interest in categorizing persons whose irregular origin creates hereditary status consequences, the broader context within which the Israelite ḥalalah category operates Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Tablet A §§40-41 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 direct contradiction.
CEDAW Article 16 guarantees the same right to enter marriage without discrimination; the ḥalalah category imposes a permanent hereditary marital disqualification on a woman for acts performed by her parents, creating a status-based marriage bar with no parallel imposed on men born of equivalent unions.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The ḥalalah system attaches a permanent, publicly recognized disqualifying status to women born of certain priestly unions, while the male ḥalal loses priestly privileges but faces no comparable bar on the marriage pool available to him, encoding an asymmetric hereditary burden based on sex.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Violation carries thirty-nine lashes; no contemporary legal system imposes corporal punishment on a man for his choice of marriage partner, nor recognizes hereditary disqualification of women from particular marriage pools as a 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.
Malkot requires a functioning Sanhedrin; the lashes sanction is de facto suspended, though the ḥalalah marriage restriction remains de jure operative in Orthodox communal practice.