[ ]Mapping the Familyorigin, a unit usually consisting of parents and children, or the nuclear
family that he has created as an adult; many people use the term to in-
dicate both of those units and may intend to include a spouse’s family of
origin as well. Family may also denote a more extended group, including
a n i nd iv idua l’s g ra ndpa rents, au nts, u ncles, a nd cousi ns. Today, d ivorce
and remarriage are common, so a person may be including in the word
“family” her stepparents, half-siblings, stepsiblings, unmarried part-
ners of family members, former spouses of relatives, and so on. At times,
close friends are spoken of as being “part of the family,” despite the ab-
sence of any ties of blood or marriage.
Within a family unit, an individual will have multiple roles. In the nu-
clear family in which an individual grows up, she may be a daughter and
a sister; in the extended family, she is also a granddaughter, a niece, and
a cousin. Upon marriage, an individual may be assigned new roles: wife,
daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law. These roles describe a person’s rela-
tionship to a variety of individuals and can be played out concurrently.
As we have already noted, levirate involves shifting and redefining an
individual’s roles within a family. Presumably the extended family’s
acceptance or rejection of those shifts may have influenced decisions
made regarding levirate or its success as a strategy of continuity.
In the opening sentences of a chapter entitled “Kinship, Family and
Descent,” Robin Fox observes that “kinship and marriage are about the
basic facts of life. They are about ‘birth, and copulation, and death.’ ”^1
Levirate marriage features all three of these acts; a childless man’s death
leads to the expectation that his brother and widow will have sexual
inter course with the goal of producing a child to carry on the deceased’s
“name.” Although a levirate union takes place between two individu-
als, it represents an attempt to perpetuate a family. Furthermore, the
relationships between individual family members — the deceased and
his surviving brothers, the widow and her brother-in-law — determine,
in part, whether the goals of levirate can be realized. Analyzing kinship
structures, therefore, should help us understand rabbinic constructs of
levirate; conversely, rabbinic discussions of levirate marriage offer some
of the best data for analyzing kinship structures in rabbinic Judaism.
This chapter relies heavily on anthropological approaches to the
study of family and kinship. I believe that anthropology offers scholars
of rabbinic Judaism a valuable framework through which to discuss the