[ ]Levirate from the Hebrew Bible Through the Mishnahsaw both levirate marriage and halitza as acceptable responses to the
levirate bond, and that the amoraim were divided, with the Palestinian
rabbis preferring halitza and the Babylonian rabbis preferring levirate
marriage.^79 These preferences speak as much to the social climate of the
Roman Empire and Sasanian Babylonia as they do to internal concerns
of the Jewish community, reflecting, I argue, marriage patterns and
strategies of continuity among non-Jews and Jews. Our discussions of
rabbinic texts, then, will not focus on how they do or do not reflect the
marriage choices made by “real” Jews in Late Antiquity. Rather our fo-
cus will be on the ways in which the rabbis who wrote these documents
understood “family” and the impact levirate law might have on families
and their individual members.
Rabbinic discussions of levirate clarify some of the ambiguities pres-
ent in the biblical text. The Mishnah understands the phrase “When
brothers dwell together” not as an attempt to limit levirate to situations
where brothers share a family estate, but as an exclusion of brothers
born after the death of the levirate widow’s husband.^80 The rabbis’ un-
dersta nd i ng of “son” (ben) is ex pa nsive, el i m i nat i ng t he need for lev i rate
if the deceased left any descendants.^81 The status of all children born of
a levirate union is the same; all are assigned to the levir and are treated
as his legal offspring.
Conclusions
Deuteronomy serves as the basis of rabbinic constructs of levirate.
While Genesis and Ruth – leave open the possibility that a kins-
man other than the deceased’s brother might marry the widow, levirate
law in the Mishnah and the Tosefta restricts the levirate obligation to a
man’s brothers and further limits levirate to brothers with a common fa-
ther. The opening chapters of Mishnah Yevamot suggest that the incest
prohibitions in Leviticus and have more impact on rabbinic con-
structs of levirate than do the narratives found in Genesis and Ruth,
insofar as the Mishnah restricts levirate marriage when it would involve
a union between two closely related individuals.
The main actors in levirate are, according to Deuteronomy , the le-
vir and his widowed sister-in-law. The elders of the community play a
role in both Deuteronomy and Ruth, serving as witnesses in both cases
and as a disapproving chorus in the former. Genesis and Ruth sug-