According to the laws of the Torah, a cohen is forbidden to marry a harlot or a defiled woman, for it is written “He shall not take a harlot or a defiled woman” (Leviticus 21:7). According to the sages a woman is considered a harlot if she had sexual relations in contradiction to the laws of the Torah. A defiled woman, the sages ruled, is one who had sexual relations which would be forbidden to a cohen. One sage, Rav Papa, asked his colleague: If a Jew has sexual relations with his sister, his sister is considered a harlot according to the widely-accepted law. Is the sister also considered a defiled woman? What are the issues under debate? On one hand, they ruled that a woman is considered defiled only if she is involved in a sexual relationship prohibited to a cohen, and a sister is not forbidden because one is a cohen; every man is forbidden to have sex with his own sister. On the other hand, since sex with one’s sister is a very serious transgression, perhaps she should be considered defiled, even though the prohibition has nothing to do with the priesthood.
\nAnswer: The sister does not become a defiled woman, only a harlot. Therefore another sage, Rav Ashi, concludes that if a cohen has sex with his sister, the sister is considered a harlot. If he has sex with her again, she is also considered a defiled woman, for she was judged to be a harlot and a cohen may not have a sexual relationship with a harlot.
\n(Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 77b)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to the laws of the Torah, a cohen is forbidden to marry a harlot or a defiled woman, for it is written “He shall not take a harlot or a defiled woman” (Leviticus 21:7). According to the sages a woman is considered a harlot if she had sexual relations in contradiction to the laws […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2610,"featured_media":20163,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[358],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-peppers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2610"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12661"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21846,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12661\/revisions\/21846"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daatemet.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}