레위기 21:7의 주석

זנה is a woman who had sexual intercourse with an Israelite who is forbidden to her as a husband, for instance, with those whom she may not marry under the penalty of excision, or a Gibeonite or a ממזר (that is, a man born from the union of a couple who are liable to excision for such a union) (cf. Sifra, Emor, Chapter 1 7; Yevamot 61b).

כי קדוש הוא לאלוקיו, every member of the tribe is by definition בעל בעמיו, an especially distinguished personage among his people. If he were to marry someone guilty of or unfortunate enough to belong to the categories mentioned in this verse, the husband would no longer be entitled to the sanctity his birthright had not only entitled him to but had expected him to preserve.

וחללה, a daughter of the category of people of whom the Torah had warned in verse 15 that by marrying them he would desecrate his seed.

אשה זונה וחללה לא יקחו, “they are not to marry a woman who is either a harlot (has desecrated herself) or has been desecrated through no fault of her own. (by birth)” When speaking of the ordinary priest, the Torah lists the women disqualified in the order of “harlot, disqualified by birth, divorced,” whereas when speaking of the High Priest the order is reversed “widow, divorced, disqualified by birth, harlot.” My late father of sainted memory [the R’osh, Ed.] explained the reason for this reversal in sequence as follows: in the case of the ordinary priest the Torah follows the pattern of forbidding not only a woman who had disqualified herself by her own conduct, but even women who had been disqualified by accidents of fate, or even women who clearly had once qualified to become the wives of priests but who had been divorced by their first husbands. Seeing that in the case of the High Priest the Torah added another disqualification, i.e. widow, it mentioned this special disqualification first. Having started with a disqualification which is neither genetic nor due to character faults, the Torah proceeds from the relatively minor disqualification to the most severe one, i.e. being a harlot.

Because she had sexual relations in one of the marriages forbidden to a kohein. For example, a widow [who was married] to a Kohein Godol, or a chalutzah to a regular kohein, who becomes profaned from the kehunah. She is called profaned even though she was already forbidden to a kohein, [since] there is a difference. If a kohein had relations with her afterwards, he will be liable for two negative commands, one because of [her being] a widow and a chalutzah, and one because of [her being] profane.

אשה זונה, “a woman who had engaged in a sexual relationship with a partner forbidden to Israelites;” (RashiIf so, why would she on account of that be forbidden to marry an ordinary priest? We find only one single Rabbi in the Mishnah who rules that if an unmarried male Israelite had intercourse with an unmarried Israelite woman that she becomes forbidden to be married to a priest! The opinion of that Rabbi was never accepted as halachah. (Talmud, tractate Yevamot folio 61) The only woman who is known by the stigma zonah, as a harlot, is the one who had had sexual relations with someone disqualified as a priest, as Rashi himself pointed out in his commentary on Ketuvot, foIio 30.ו

חללה — This is a woman born from a marriage which is forbidden to the priesthood alone (Kiddushin 77a), e. g., the daughter of a widow and a high priest, or the daughter of a divorced woman [or one released from levirate marriage by the appropriate ceremony (cf. Deuteronomy 25:9)] and an ordinary priest. So also it denotes a woman who became profaned in respect to the priesthood (who lost the right of marrying a priest) through her having previously entered into a union with one of those priests a marriage with whom comes under the term: "marriages forbidden to the priesthood alone”.

חללה, “a woman who has been profaned;” the letter ו at the beginning of this word means “or,” and substitutes for או. The same applies to the letter ו in ואשה גרושה, “or a woman who had been divorced;”

גרושה מאישה, “divorced from her husband;” according to Rabbi Elazar ben Matya, this must be understood as distinct from someone no longer her husband, as he had abandoned her and emigrated overseas and has not been heard from. In the meantime this woman had remarried, and after a while her first husband turns up and claims her as his wife. Our verse comes to tell us that she can return to her former husband although in the meantime she had received a divorce decree from her second husband, and in the event that her first husband is a priest, she has not lost her status as being legally a priest’s wife. All this the sages derived from the otherwise superfluous words: “from her husband,” as who else could have divorced her? In the scenario just described her “marriage” to her second husband would not have been recognised as a marriage, hence her “divorce” from the second “husband,” was not a divorce at all.