Leviticus 18:11

The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter,.... Either the daughter of his father by another wife, which seems to be countenanced by what follows: begotten of thy father, she [is] thy sister; but

The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness. The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter, begotten of thy father.

Begotten of thy father, or, being akin to thy father. He seems to speak of the daughter of the father’ s brother by his wife, whom the father here spoken of, being brother to the deceased person, married by virtue of that law, , by which marriage there was a near kindred contracted between the two families, so that the son of the one could not marry the daughter of the other. Thus this law is differing from that . And that seems more probable, than that in so brief a table of laws the same thing should be forbidden both there and here. Object. The word being the same here and , must be understood in the same sense, and therefore here must be rendered begotten or born, as it is there. Answ. It may be rendered there as well as here akin, as some render the words there of domestic, or of another, a foreign, kindred; and if the word had been participially put for begotten or born, it is likely the preposition mem or lamed would have been prefixed to the Hebrew word abicha, as is common in those cases.

Leviticus 18:11 The nakedness of thy father’ s wife’ s daughter, begotten of thy father, she [is] thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.Ver. 11. Thou shalt not uncover.] This verse is added for an exposition of Lev 18:9.

(11) Thy father’s wife’s daughter.—If this clause stood alone it would denote the daughter of a man’s stepmother by another or previous husband, since “father’s wife” in Hebrew always denotes stepmother (see Leviticus 18:8, Leviticus 20:11; Deuteronomy 23:1, Deut. 26:20), in which case the man and the maiden, though no blood relations at all, would be forbidden to each other by virtue of the damsel’s mother having married the man’s father. It would thus differ from Leviticus 18:9, where the maiden is a half-sister either by the same father or the same mother. Begotten of thy father.—Literally, the birth, or offspring of thy father (see Leviticus 18:9), that is, though the daughter of the stepmother, she is begotten by the same father, and hence is his half-sister on the father’s side, which is exactly the same case already prohibited in the first clause of Lev 18:9. Hence to avoid a senseless repetition of the same prohibition we must either regard this clause as having crept into the text from a marginal gloss, or we must correct the first letter of the disjunctive particle in Leviticus 18:9, which would make it “the nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father and the daughter of thy mother.” Accordingly, Leviticus 18:9 prohibits marriage with a full sister, whilst the verse before us forbids it with a half-sister. The latter is the more probable, since intermarriage between entire stepbrother and stepsister has always been, and still is, legitimate among the Jews.

11. Father’s wife’s daughter — Knobel finds this distinction between this and Leviticus 18:9, namely, that the words “father’s wife” include the mother as well as the stepmother, and thus specifically state the full sister.