Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]family, ensuring that we use scholarly tools rather than impose our own
notions of family on ancient texts. Following discussions of kinship by
anthropologists, this chapter addresses several topics: terminology and
systems of kinship nomenclature, incest, forms of marriage and mar-
riage regulations, and descent. It then analyzes a series of rabbinic dis-
cussions about family and kinship, arguing that the rabbis recognized
multiple types of families, each intertwined with or embedded in the
others.
It is beyond the scope of this work to offer a full anthropological
analy sis of the kinship structure of ancient Judaism. Such a study might
be impossible, given the types of data that are and are not available to us.
Instead, this chapter is intended to bring the terminology and insights of
anthropological studies on kinship to bear on our understanding of rab-
binic discussions of family law, in particular the laws of levirate.
Defining Family
As indicated at the beginning of the chapter, the word “family” may be
used to describe a variety of configurations. Descent may play into a
person’s understanding of family, leading an individual to consider only
his father’s or mother’s kin as his family or extending the term to the
relatives of both parents. Upon marriage, a woman may leave her fam-
ily of origin and be adopted into her husband’s family, or she may enjoy
membership in both her natal family and that of her husband. A man
may or may not consider his wife’s relatives part of his family. Under-
standings of who is inside or outside one’s family reflect and shape a
community’s understanding of the rights and responsibilities that go
along with membership in a family.
One term used in the Hebrew Bible to describe the relationship be-
tween related individuals is beit av. Translated as “the father’s house,”
this term, according to Carol Meyers, “denotes the extended or com-
pound family that inhabits a residential unit of several linked dwell-
i n g s .”^2 This unit was patrilocal as well as patrilineal; land was passed
from a man to his sons, who would reside with their own wives and chil-
dren on their ancestral land, while daughters left their families to live
in the beit av of their husbands.^3 Any given beit av could be an extended
family, comprising several generations, or it might correspond to our
contemporary nuclear family; the composition of a particular beit av