A woman shall not wear men’s clothing, neither shall a man put on women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to Yahweh your God.
A woman shall not wear a man's garments
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־יִהְיֶה כְלִי־גֶבֶר עַל־אִשָּׁה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
שהזהירנו מהמשך אחר חקות העכו"ם, שתהיינה הנשים לובשות בגדי האנשים ושיתקשטו בתכשיטיהם. והוא אמרו לא יהיה כלי גבר על אשה, וכל אשה שתתקשט באחד מתכשיטי האנשים המפורסמים בעיר ההיא שזה הוא תכשיט מיוחד לאנשים לוקה. (שם, שם):
That He prohibited us from being drawn to the practices of the idolaters, such that women wear mens' clothes and adorn themselves with their ornaments. And that is His saying, "The garment of a man shall not be on a woman" (Deuteronomy 22:5). And any woman who adorns herself with a man's ornament - that is well-known in that city that it is an ornament specific to men - is lashed. (See Parashat Shoftim; Mishneh Torah, Foreign Worship and Customs of the Nations 11.)
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, with modification
- 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 Virtutibus 20-21 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.301 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Sahih al-Bukhari 5885 carried a thematic parallel
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 Hittite ritual texts assign the spindle as the female gender-essence token and the weapon as the male; using the wrong token in sympathetic ritual effects a gender transformation — the very semantic range that underlies the Deuteronomic term keli gever ('man's equipment') and the prohibition against women bearing men's implements (classified as to'evah in the same verse) Relationship to the parallel: shared theme §§200a-200b (ritual-purity miscellany); cf. Hoffner, JBL 85 (1966) 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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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment prohibits a woman from wearing men's clothing or carrying men's equipment under threat of corporal punishment, using state-backed religious enforcement to police gendered self-presentation; post-Enlightenment bodily-autonomy norms hold that personal clothing and equipment choices are matters of individual self-determination not subject to criminal sanction.
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Article 5
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
CEDAW Article 5 requires states to modify social and cultural patterns that rest on stereotyped roles for men and women; the commandment encodes precisely such stereotyped gender roles into binding law and enforces them with corporal punishment, contrary to CEDAW's mandate to eliminate role-stereotyping.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The prohibition specifically targets women who bear or wear items classified as male, enforcing a gendered hierarchy in which women are prohibited from accessing symbols of male status (weapons, tools, authority markers); modern gender-equality norms reject the use of law to impose differential behavioral constraints based on sex.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The commandment imposes 39 lashes for a woman's clothing or equipment choice; contemporary criminal law does not recognize personal dress as a punishable offense, and corporal punishment for such choices is incompatible with modern penal frameworks.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; flogging a woman for carrying men's equipment or wearing men's clothing constitutes corporal punishment categorically barred by this provision.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that lash-jurisdiction lapsed with the dissolution of ordained Sanhedrin courts after 70 CE; the de jure corporal sanction for this prohibition is textually operative but practically suspended.