Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]brother” or “my mother’s sister’s husband.” In some cultures, non-family
members may be addressed by terms also used for kin but may not be
referred to that way in conversation with a third party.
An analysis of rabbinic kinship terminology must focus primarily
on referential terms rather than terms of address. Most of the material
that focuses on family relationships is legal and not dialogic; rabbinic
literature contains few exchanges in which family members employ
terms of address. Furthermore, these texts are not the work of cultural
anthropologists recording exchanges among family members. They are
carefully edited texts intended for an elite audience and cannot serve
as evidence of the way Jews in Late Antiquity spoke to each other.^26 Any
discussion of kinship terminology in rabbinic literature, then, must fo-
cus on the referential terms that are used and what they suggest about
constructs of family and kinship.
Rabbinic literature relies heavily on the lexicon of the Hebrew Bible
for kinship nomenclature. This lexicon includes words that denote the
primary relationships in a nuclear family: father, mother, son, daughter,
brother, and sister. Most of these words can have a precise meaning in-
dicating a biological relationship between two parties, as when Jacob’s
sons, reporting on their encounter with the vizier of Egypt say, “But the
man kept asking about us and our family, saying, ‘Is your father still liv-
ing? Have you another brother?’ ”^27 or when Abra ha m describes Sa ra h as
“my sister, my father’s daughter.”^28 The words can have a broader con-
notation, as when God promises Abraham that he will be “the father
of many nations” or when Eve is described as “the mother of all living
t h i n g s .”
Relationships and roles created through marriage can also be ac-
knowledged through the use of particular words or terms to identify
spouses and in-laws. However, there are no words in classical Hebrew
whose exclusive meanings are “wife” and “husband.” The word for
woman, isha, can also mean wife, and the word for master or owner, ba’al,
can indicate a husband. The term eshet ish, created by placing the word
for woman in construct with the word “man,” always conveys the mean-
ing of wife. Similarly the construct ba’al isha, literally “the master/ow ner
of a woman,” means husband. Despite the absence of a unique term to
denote the marital relationship, classical Hebrew has terms for the re-
lationship between an individual and his or her in-laws: “father-in-law”