Levirate Marriage and the Family[ ]generations and including in-laws as well as blood relations and their
spouses.
Meyers argues that the incest laws found in Leviticus are evidence
of shared residence by extended families. While this may have been the
case in early Israel, the rabbis’ retention and expansion of these rules is
not proof that they experienced or idealized such living arrangements.
The prohibition against a man’s having sexual relations with his wife’s
mother or sister or his mother’s sister may exist even in a patrilocal so-
ciety; thus it seems reasonable to assert that a man’s being forbidden to
have sexual relations with his father’s brother’s wife is not evidence of
patrilineal relatives sharing a house or compound. Instead, these laws
indicate a broad understanding of family, one that is not incompatible
with the possibility of nuclear families living separate from the husband
(or wife’s) family. At the same time, the emphasis in rabbinic texts on the
possible clash between incest prohibitions and levirate obligations sug-
gests that marriages within families and multiple marriages between
two families may have been part of the rabbis’ construct of family.
Forms of Marriage and Regulation on Marriage
Anthropologists struggle to define marriage, arguing over whether the
definition follows from joint residence, formal recognition of a union
through ritual, or the granting of sexual rights and recognition of the
children of the union as members of one or both of their parents’ de-
scent groups and their heirs.^66 Rabbinic law understands marriage to be
a relationship between a man and a woman that is formalized through
ritual and confers rights and obligations on both parties.^67
There are several forms of marriage. Marriage may be monogamous,
requiring that an individual have no more than one spouse at a given
time. Societies may permit or even encourage polygamy, allowing an in-
dividual to be married to more than one person at a time. Most polyga-
mous societies are polygynous, allowing a man to have more than one
wife at a time. Much rarer is polyandry, a form of marriage that allows a
woman to have multiple husbands simultaneously.
Rabbinic literature assumes the legality of polygyny. This assump-
tion is woven through all discussions of levirate marriage. The restric-
tions on marriage between a levir and the wives of his deceased brother
discussed in the opening mishnayot of Yevamot, chs. and , assume