What Does Leviticus 18:16 Mean?
Do not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. It is your brother's 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
Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness.THE KEY
The verse names the brother’s wife’s nakedness as his because uncovering is treated as a relational act of exposure, not an event involving only one body.
THE MEANING
This verse places a boundary around your brother’s marriage: his wife’s nakedness is named as his nakedness. Exposure is treated as relational, so the bond between them remains present in the act the verse names.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that exposure concerns only the person being exposed; the verse names the brother as implicated through the marital bond.
THE ROOT
תְגַלֵּה
tegalleh
GROWS FROM
גלה
גלה (galah) means to uncover, reveal, or expose: to bring what was covered into view.
The verb means to uncover or expose, and its root also names the state of being revealed. That makes the verse’s language of nakedness relational: exposure is spoken through the bond between the woman and her brother’s husband.
ALSO GROWS
galah: Uncover, reveal, expose
גָּלָה
The verse’s verb תְגַלֵּה (tegalleh, “you uncover”) is formed from this root, naming the action directly.
niglah: Be revealed, become visible
נִגְלָה
This form preserves the root’s consonants while shifting attention to what comes into view, illuminating the verse’s concern with exposure.
THE PATTERN
Scripture presents sexual exposure and union as bound to relationships, not as acts involving isolated bodies.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.And if a man takes his brother's wife, it is a thing of separation. He has uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be bare of children.Or have you not seen that the one glued to a seller of bodies is one body? For, he says, the two will be one flesh.THE THREAD
And he drank of the wine, and was drunk, and he was uncovered in the midst of his tent.Genesis uses the same root, גלה (galah, “uncover” or “reveal”), when Noah is uncovered. The shared word makes exposure the common thread, while Leviticus names the brother’s marital bond as part of what that exposure implicates.
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