Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]may be compounded by the levir’s reaction to being married to a woman
who was once his brother’s wife. The Mishnah acknowledges this prob-
lem in a discussion about a woman who claims that her levirate union
has not been consummated. Commenting on the Mishnah, the Bavli
suggests t hat a ma n may be u ncom for table hav ing intercou rse w it h “h is
brother’s wife,” hinting that the levir’s marriage to his sister-in-law does
not erase his tendency to think of her as his sister-in-law.^54
The rabbis’ interest in levirate is focused primarily on the clarifi-
cation of the status of a levirate widow, clarification that is made pos-
sible through either levirate marriage or halitza. Neither the Mishnah
nor the two Talmuds discuss the levirate union in depth, insisting in-
stead that it is a marriage like all other marriages. Legally, the death of
a childless man and the subsequent levirate union between his widow
and brother transform the relationship between the woman and the
man; they move from being in-laws between whom a sexual relation-
ship would be incestuous to man and wife. The levir, in a sense, takes
on his brother’s relationship with the woman. The partners to the levi-
rate union are, so to speak, relabeled, becoming “husband” and “wife”
instead of “brother-in-law” and “sister-in-law.” The woman retains al-
most identical relationships to members of her husband’s extended
family — she has the same father-in-law and mother-in-law she had dur-
ing her first marriage — while the levir acquires new in-laws. If the levir
was already married, his wife and children find themselves in a new re-
lationship with the yevama; she becomes co-wife and father’s wife where
she was previously sister-in-law and aunt. This shift would presumably
be a problematic one, given the assumed tension among co-wives. Aside
from an acknowledgment that a man might not have the same desire
for his former sister-in-law that he would for a w ife acquired in a norma l
fashion, none of the rabbinic sources discuss the difficulty in reorient-
ing one’s understanding of familial relationships.
The Levir and His Family
Rabbinic texts are also silent regarding the extended family’s interest in
levirate and the possibility that the family of the deceased and the le-
vir may have been instrumental in promoting or discouraging levirate.
Research by anthropologists suggests that, in some cultures, the family
of the deceased may play an important role in the decision of a levir or