Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]binic literature is the nuclear family, the family composed of a man, his
wife, and their children. The tendency to use terms like “a man and his
wife” when imagining a household suggests that while polygyny was
permitted, monogamy was the rabbinic ideal and the norm. The use of
the “wife as house” metaphor suggests that while an extended family
might share a residence (especially when brothers jointly inherited a
house from their father), married couples frequently did not live with
the husband’s parents; it is difficult to imagine men referring to their
wives as their “houses” if the house was occupied by several generations
and the mother, not the wife, was often the senior female member of the
family.^20 The rabbis’ frequent use of the term ba’al habayit, literally “the
master of the house,” to describe an adult male indicates that establish-
ing an independent household, separate from one’s parents, was one of
the indications of adulthood for men.^21
Kinship Terminology
Societies as a whole and institutions within those societies organize
human life. Within society and within the institutions of a society, in-
dividuals are assigned statuses and roles.^22 According to anthropolo-
gist Ralph Linton, “A Status, as distinct from the individual who may
occupy it, is simply a collection of rights and duties.... A role represents
the dynamic aspect of a status.”^23 An individual may have multiple sta-
tuses and a corresponding number of roles. A person’s status — or title —
informs the person and those around him as to what is expected of and
due to him.
Within a family, individuals have multiple statuses, each one de-
scribing the individual’s relationship to other members of the family.
Statuses and roles are reciprocal; one person’s status as father presumes
another person’s status as son or daughter. Attributing a status that con-
veys kinship bonds to an individual suggests that members of families
have certain responsibilities to each other and can make certain claims
on each other.^24 The use of a term to indicate a particular relationship
should tell us something about what that relationship means in a given
culture. An analysis of kinship terminology, then, provides information
about a culture.
There are four major kinship nomenclature systems. Each offers a
different way of describing the relationships between an individual (re-