Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]tween men and their sister’s daughters, while Babylonian sources prefer
marriages between women and their father’s brother.^75 Marriages be-
tween members of the same patrilineage could be promoted to “ensure
a socially compatible partner and also to preserve property within the
family.”^76 Numbers prescribes marriage within the patrilineage for
daughters who inherited their father’s land; such marriages may still
have been favored by Jews in Late Antiquity when a daughter was her
father’s heir. In a patrilocal society, marrying a daughter within her fa-
ther’s extended family may have been a device to ensure that a daughter
was well treated by her in-laws. Babylonian sources indicate a desire on
the part of parents to marry their daughters within their lineages and
their tendency to equate marriage outside the family with the loss of a
daughter.^77
We do not have demographic information to determine the extent
to which the Jews of antiquity practiced marriage within the extended
family. Many mishnayot in the opening chapters of Yevamot assume
such marriages. The rule in Mishnah Yevamot : covers situations in
which one brother is married to a woman who is a close relative of a
second brother; among these marriages are uncle – niece and great-
uncle – niece unions.
Mishnah Yevamot offers a number of rules governing situations in
which two or more brothers are married to sisters.^78 There is no indica-
tion elsewhere in rabbinic literature that this was a preferred marriage
strategy. One can imagine that in a society where brothers lived and
worked together on property jointly inherited from their father, such
marriages could serve to create harmony in a household that included
the brothers, their wives, and children.^79
For Jewish communities that preferred monogamy, levirate marriage
would have become more problematic. Polygyny allows a married man
to take his brother’s widow as a second wife or, if he is still single, to
marry his brother’s widow without sacrificing the opportunity to make
an advantageous or desirable union. To the extent that ancient Jews
chose to marry permitted relatives, in particular to marry a sibling’s
daughter, levirate might be complicated or even prohibited in many
situations. The Mishnah addresses such situations, particularly those
in which brothers marry sisters. While this material cannot further our
knowledge of Jewish marriage patterns in antiquity, it suggests that the