Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]There is also, according to Boyarin, a strong sense in the sugya that even
when a man does father sons, he cannot be sure that they will be “suit-
able” heirs, that is, that they will resemble their father in piety and schol-
arship. The alternative offered by the sugya is the production of “spiri-
tual” heirs, children who are born through the intervention of a rabbi,
or students to whom he imparts Torah. These avenues are endorsed by
the story of Rabbi Eleazar ben Simeon’s determination that sixty women
are permitted to have intercourse with their husbands, resulting in the
birth of sixty sons who are named after him, and Rabbi Yohanan’s habit
of sitting outside the mikveh so that women may gaze on him as they
return home from their ritual immersions and conceive sons who will
be as beautiful as he is. These children are, in some sense, the children
of Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Yohanan.^69 I will return to this issue in the
Conclusion; for now, it is sufficient to note that the rabbis acknowledge
that having biological descendants is an uncertain prospect and one
that may not produce the desired results.
Conclusions
Biological paternity could not be determined with any degree of cer-
tainty until the advent of modern DNA testing. In a legal system, the as-
signment of paternity is an artificial construct. While paternity is often
assumed to be biological as well as jural — that is, one often assumes
that the legal father of a child is also that child’s biological father — pa-
ternity can also be assigned or ended by legal means. Adoption ends the
parental rights of one man, presumably the biological father, and awards
them to the adoptive father, who may have no blood ties to the child. In
most marriage systems that practice levirate, paternity is assigned to the
mother’s deceased husband, even though he is certainly not the biologi-
ca l fat her of her children. In some cases, a ma n may even assign his w ife
to another man in order to produce an heir for himself; he may also be
able to “lend” his wife to another man so that the man can obtain an
heir. When the arrangement is concluded, the first husband reclaims his
wife, and any subsequent children born to her are legally his.
While the three-month waiting period between a man’s death and
his widow’s remarriage is fixed to provide some degree of certainty as
to paternity, rabbinic law determines jural rather than biological pater-
nity, while assuming that a husband is usually the biological father of