[ ]Paternity and Continuityhis wife’s children. A man is the legal father of his wife’s children and
cannot claim paternity over children born to another man’s wife.^70 Pa-
ternity cannot be reassigned through adoption; although a stepfather
may raise his wife’s children by an earlier marriage, they remain the le-
gal offspring of her previous husband. A man’s obligation to procreate
can be fulfilled through the birth of children to any of his wives, but
that obligation cannot be fulfilled through the agency of another man.
The right of a man under ancient Iranian law to temporarily assign his
wife to another man for the purpose of begetting an heir and his right
to essentially lend his wife to another man to provide the latter with
an heir are unimaginable to the rabbis. In theory, under the rabbinic
pronouncement that a married woman’s children were assumed to be
her husband’s, a childless man could look the other way while his wife
committed adultery and then claim the resulting child as his own; how-
ever, such a strategy would be deeply problematic and violate the laws
of adultery.
This construct of paternity makes completely understandable the
rabbinic insistence that the child of a levirate union is the legal offspring
of the levir. The rabbis treat levirate not as an informal union between
a man and his widowed sister-in-law, but as a marriage. The levir, upon
marriage, assumes all of the rights and responsibilities of a husband, in-
cluding the right to claim paternity over children born of the marriage.
This assignment of paternity recognizes the relationship between the
yevama and her brother-in-law, not the relationship between her and
her deceased husband, as the central factor in determining the status
of their children. It also ensures that the children of a levirate union
will receive all of the financial (and emotional) support due to children
from a father. While the Bavli and the Yerushalmi imagine instances in
which a child of doubtful paternity might prefer, for financial reasons, to
claim the deceased rather than the levir as his father, no such assump-
tion is made when the child is clearly the son of the levir. Levirate, as
imagined by the rabbis, allows for the creation of a new partnership and
a new nuclear family. While the initial bond between the levir and the
yevama is generated by the death of the latter’s husband, the legal bonds
between them after marriage are those of a husband and wife, and their
children are treated as the children of a normal marriage. Whether this
is a rabbinic innovation or a validation of previous practice is impos-