He must not go in to any dead body, or defile himself for his father or for his mother.
The High Priest shall not defile himself for the dead except in the prescribed manner
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְעַל כָּל־נַפְשֹׁת מֵת לֹא יָבֹא לְאָבִיו וּלְאִמּוֹ לֹא יִטַּמָּא (partial quotation of Lev 21:11)
Literary form: a flat, unconditional prohibition
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 Theoretical
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 1.113-116 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.
- hittite instructions purity regulations requiring Hittite temple personnel to guard against and purify from contamination before approaching the deity and resuming temple service; the Israelite formulation by contrast imposes a perpetual, active corpse-purity-maintenance duty specifically on the High Priest Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence Instructions for Temple Officials (CTH 264) McMahon, 'Instructions to Priests and Temple Officials' (CTH 264), in Hallo (ed.), Context of Scripture 1.83; cf. Taggar-Cohen, Hittite Priesthood (2006)
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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.