Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]widows — and the expectations of the extended family regarding obli-
gations to the dead.
Scholars have often resisted comparisons between Israelite culture
and other cultures, or at best have preferred to restrict their compara-
tive work to cultures that lived in close proximity to Israel.^1 This method
would suggest that to better understand levirate in ancient Judaism
we might investigate levirate in the ancient Near East and consider re-
sponses to the death of a childless man in the Roman Empire and Baby-
lonia during Late Antiquity. I will in fact consider these issues in later
chapters. However, I believe that a broader cross-cultural consideration
of levirate will enrich our understanding of Jewish constructs of that
institution.
The ancient Israelites did not invent levirate, but they undoubtedly
adapted it to their needs.^2 In the post-biblical period, the rabbis con-
tinued to adapt levirate to reflect changing family structure, marriage
practices, and inheritance law. An analysis of levirate in other cultures,
including anthropological studies of levirate in the twentieth century,
when we have not only laws but ethnographic information and inter-
views, may help us understand how levirate interacts with and responds
to broader cultural concerns. This in turn could help us in our investi-
gation of rabbinic laws and cases, where cultural concerns and human
reactions to levirate situations are often not explicit but must be teased
out of texts.
While rabbinic sources discuss levirate at length and in great detail,
pre-rabbinic sources provide little information about levirate. The ex-
tant biblical passages provide minimal information about levirate law
and mention one or two incidents of levirate unions. Outside of the
Hebrew Bible, we have no data on levirate in ancient Israel. Although
cross-cultural analysis has its limitations, and great variation may exist
between ancient Israel’s use of levirate and the employment of levirate
in other places at other times, a broader survey of levirate may shed light
on levirate in a Jewish context.^3 By comparing and contrasting levirate
in ancient Israel and early Judaism with levirate in other societies, we
may be able to pinpoint the social and economic concerns that under-
pin levirate in Israel and understand the changes in levirate described
in rabbinic texts.
My work in this chapter relies on a number of studies of marriage in