Christian Beikov I am curious what happens when you remove that check/exception and then have a query where the WITH/ON refers to 3 tables (the join reference and 2 others)? The problem (I think) is how Hibernate generates these joins later; basically it assumes very deeply that the join-restriction only covers 2 aliases. That is part of the reason for the check. I think the check as-is is a little too restrictive even for catching that case.