Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism

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Mapping the Family

The Mishnah’s initial list [A] defines a man’s male relatives as includ-
ing male members of his nuclear family of origin and the spouses of the
female members of that family. It also includes his parents’ male sib-
lings and the spouses of their female siblings. The phrase “they and their
sons and their sons-in-law” extends the ban to a man’s nephews and
male cousins, as well as the husbands of his nieces and female cous-
ins, his stepbrothers, and the husbands of his stepsisters. Relatives by
marriage — a man’s father-in-law, brothers-in-law, and stepson — are
also included.^93 T he Mish na h does not ment ion t hat a ma n’s son may not
testify against him, apparently considering this information obvious on
the basis of Deuteronomy :.
The Bavli’s initial discussion of the Mishnah focuses on the exegesis
that supports the Mishnah’s claims. This discussion interprets Deuter-
onomy : — “Fathers shall not be put to death for sons, and sons shall
not be put to death for fathers” — as being concerned with generations
rather than with individuals, that is, banning a “father,” a man from one
generation of a family, from testifying against a “son,” a member of the
subsequent generation, whether the man in question is his own son or
his brother’s son. This reading of the words “fathers” and “sons” recalls
the bifurcate-merging system of kinship nomenclature, where an in-
dividual might refer to his paternal uncles and cousins as fathers and
siblings. Deuteronomy : appears to focus on intergenerational rela-
tionships; the Bavli expands the scope of the verse to cover relationships
between members of the same generation:

We find [in the verse support for forbidding testimony by] fathers

against sons and sons against fathers, and how much the more

so fathers against each other. From where [do we derive the

prohibition of testimony by] sons against sons?^94

This section assumes that we need no biblical support to prohibit broth-
ers (“fathers”) from testifying against each other, presumably because
their degree of kinship is so close. Cousins (“sons”) are further removed
from each other than either is from the other’s father, and additional
exegesis is required to support the prohibition against their testimony.
The next section of the sugya also employs a generational model of
family. In determining which relatives are forbidden to testify against
each other, the Bavli identifies individual members of a family as mem-