GEN791 One may violate most religious injunctions in order to save his life. Even an infant who is one day old, legally not considered viable, is entitled to the same consideration Shabbat 151b. There are three cardinal prohibitions which may not be violated even at the cost of one’s life: idolatry, adultery, and murder Sanhedrin 74a. Any commission of suicide for the sake of avoiding a transgression of other religious injunctions is a serious offense. Maimonides Yesodei haTorah 5:4.  The moral question whether religious laws may be transgressed in order to preserve a life was in issue for a long time. Some sectarian groups, such as the Qumran sect, apparently believed that the primacy of the law should never be via compromised (See Bloch, The Biblical and Historical Background of Jewish Customs and Ceremonies, p 117). On the other hand, a Hasmonean court (2nd cent. B.C.E.) ruled that one may desecrate the Sabbath to defend his life I Macc. 2:41. It seems that no such dispensation was ever granted prior to the Hasmonean era. The Talmud accepted the principle of the primacy of life. Rabbi Ishmael (3nd cent.) voiced a minority opinion that even the law forbidding idolatry may be transgressed (not in public) when one ordered to do so at the risk of his life. He based his view on the verse in Leviticus 18:5 “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, which if a man do he shall live in them.” Rabbi Ishmael commented on the last phrase of the verse: “’he shall live in them’ but not die by them” Sanhedrin 74a  The primacy of life was apparently paramount in the moral code of the Semitic patriarchs. Abraham requested Sarah to tell Pharoah that she was his sister, not his wife, so that the king would have no need of killing him [This verse]. This request can only be rationalized by the prevailing ethical principle that all virtues, including marital fidelity, maybe waived in the interest of saving a life. The rabbinic majority opinion was crystallized after a long debate in the upper chamber of the House of Nitzah in Lydda (ca. 135). It was during the Hadrianic persecution, when the practice of Judaism was forbidden, that the issue is finally resolved. “In every law of the Torah, if a man is commanded: ‘Transgress and suffer not death,” he may transgress and not suffer death, excepting idolatry, adultery, and murder” Sanhedrin 74a BLOCH 243-4