[ ]Paternity and Continuitysons by reducing the estate of the father from whom they will eventu-
ally inherit. It is therefore to their advantage to encourage the lawsuit
between their father and this child, proclaiming him their “brother” to
promote their own financial interests. Similarly, the last case discussed
in the Yerushalmi imagines a show of fraternal solidarity only when that
display allows the levir’s acknowledged sons to claim a larger estate; if
the levir’s brother was poor, they are happy to acknowledge him as the
child’s father, denying that the child is their brother. The Yerushalmi
also imagines a child disowning his “father,” the levir, in order to assert
his claim to the estate of his mother; by denying the levir and claiming
the deceased as his father, the child asserts that his mother’s marriage
to the levir was invalid. Both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi indicate that
money trumps family ties.
These cases leave the reader to imagine a family living for years with
the uncertainty caused by the decision of the levir and the levirate widow
to enter into a union within a month or two of the death of the woman’s
husband.^28 The child of the union, born less than nine months after the
levirate marriage, grows up uncertain as to his relationship to the levir.
The marriage between the levir and the child’s mother, according to the
Mishnah, must be dissolved. The child would grow up either without a
father or, if his mother remarried, with a stepfather on whom he has no
legal claim of kinship. His place within his patrilineal family is unclear.
Although the child is legitimate, he is officially fatherless. The levir may
be his biological father or his uncle; the levir’s sons by another wife may
be his siblings or his cousins. At the same time, he is clearly the grandson
of his paternal grandfather and the nephew of his paternal uncles, except
for the levir, since both of his possible fathers were their brothers.
The Bavli acknowledges that in some situations family ties may be
strained when an inheritance is at stake. The Mishnah mandates sepa-
ration of the levir and the levirate widow when paternity cannot be de-
termined. In theory, this would leave the levirate widow alone with her
child. She could remarry, in which case the child might be raised by a
stepfather. The child is legitimate and has connections to and claims on
the patrilineage of the deceased and the levir. But the Bavli suggests that
his precise role in his father’s family is never established. If he comes as
a claimant to an estate, his paternal relatives see him as a threat to their
inheritance.