Introduction[ xxi ]information, nor can they be used uncritically as historical witnesses.
I treat rabbinic texts as prescriptive rather than descriptive, insofar as
they describe institutions the way the rabbis wanted them to be rather
than the way they actually were. This book, therefore, does not attempt
to describe the ancient Jew ish family as it ex isted in roman Palestine or
Sasanian Babylonia during the first six centuries of the Common era.
Instead it explores how the rabbis imagined family relationships and
dynamics, through laws and through stories.
The texts discussed in this book are not monolithic. The earliest
texts, the mishnah and the Tosefta, were produced in Palestine toward
the end of the second and beginning of the third century ce.^12 T he Pa les-
tinian Talmud was edited several hundred years later in the same land;
the Babylonian Talmud was completed even later and against a differ-
ent political, social, and economic backdrop. Levirate marriage may
be viewed as more useful or more problematic in different settings. we
might expect, therefore, to find a variety of views and opinions about
questions of levirate marriage and about the family structures that sup-
port or inhibit levirate.
Tracing the evolution of levirate law in early rabbinic Judaism is
complicated by the difficulty of dating individual rabbinic traditions.
while many of these traditions are attributed to rabbis who are associ-
ated with specific times and places, many contemporary scholars have
questioned the reliability of these attributions.^13 rather than rely on
attributions and assign individual traditions to the rabbis with whose
names they are associated, scholars now recognize that traditions in a
given work, regardless of attribution, may better be understood as ex-
pressing the viewpoint of the text’s redactors. Accordingly, we will con-
sider the approach of the mishnah or the Babylonian Talmud to an issue
rather than assign that viewpoint to a specific rabbi. Following the work
of scholars like Daniel Boyarin, richard Kalmin, and michael Satlow,
among others, we will consider differences in approach to levirate mar-
riage in Palestinian and Babylonian sources.
I am, by training and inclination, a scholar of rabbinics, and the
primary focus of this book is on rabbinic Judaism’s understanding of
the family. At the same time, levirate operated and operates in many
cultures, and often correlates with certain types of kinship structure
and marriage systems. Insofar as knowledge of levirate in other settings