What Does Leviticus 18:11 Mean?
Do not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife's daughter, born of your father. She is your sister. Do not uncover her nakedness.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
The nakedness of thy father’s wife’s daughter, begotten of thy father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.THE KEY
A different mother does not undo the bond of birth: the daughter begotten by your father is named your sister.
THE MEANING
The verse names the daughter of your father’s wife, when she is begotten by your father, as your sister. It draws a clear boundary around her body, and that kinship remains real even when the household arrangement is complicated.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that having a different mother makes her not your sister is undone: the verse says your shared father makes her your sister.
THE ROOT
מוֹלֶדֶת
moledet
GROWS FROM
ילד
To bear or beget; to bring forth by birth.
“born of” in this verse is moledet. The verse grounds the kinship in birth: מוֹלֶדֶת (moledet, begotten) comes from יָלַד (yalad, to bear or beget). The English phrasing makes the father’s role explicit, and the root ties that fact of birth to the word for a child.
ALSO GROWS
yalad: To bear, bring forth, or beget.
יָלַד
This is the verb behind מוֹלֶדֶת (moledet), linking the sister’s identity to being born of the same father.
yeled: A child.
יֶלֶד
The shared root keeps the passage’s kinship claim anchored in the child born, not merely in the household she belongs to.
תְגַלֶּה
tegalleh
GROWS FROM
גלה
To uncover, expose, or reveal.
The command uses גָּלָה (galah, to uncover or reveal), the same root family as גִּלּוּי (gilluy, revelation or uncovering). Here “uncover” names sexual exposure, so the verse’s boundary is expressed through an image of opening what is meant to remain covered.
ALSO GROWS
galah: To uncover or reveal.
גָּלָה
This is the root verb behind תְגַלֶּה (tegalleh), making the act a deliberate exposure.
gilluy: Revelation or uncovering.
גִּלּוּי
This related noun preserves the root’s sense of making something exposed or visible, which sharpens the force of the verse’s boundary.
THE PATTERN
Scripture treats kinship as a boundary around sexual exposure, even when household arrangements or maternal lines differ.
And if a man take his sister, his father's daughter or his mother's daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness; it is a disgrace; they shall be cut off before the eyes of the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister's nakedness; he shall bear his crookedness.Cursed be he who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.It is heard commonly that there is the trade of bodies among you, and such trade as is not even named among the nations, that one should hold his father's wife.THE THREAD
And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, the gotten one, and she said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.The word “bare” translates וַתֵּלֶד (vatteled), from the same root ילד (yalad, to bear or beget) as מוֹלֶדֶת (moledet) in Leviticus 18:11. The shared root shows birth as the concrete basis for the kinship the verse names.
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