Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism (review)

In the dedication of her book to her late teacher Baruch M. Bokser, Dvora Weisberg invokes the statement of R. Eleazar ben Shammua in Mishnah Avot 4:12: “Let the honor of your student be as dear to you as your own . . . and your awe of your teacher like your awe of Heaven.” Her use of this quotation points to a link between the world of contemporary Talmud scholarship and that in which the Sages conducted their own Torah study. Weisberg’s book, indeed, strikes a balance between a keen awareness and respect for the ancient text, on the one hand, and an ability to elucidate that text and come to significant conclusions, on the other, while breaking new ground in English-language scholarship.¹

The biblical law of levirate marriage (yibbum) obliges the brother of a man who has died childless to marry his widowed sister-in-law (yevamah), an obligation the brother-in-law (the levir or yavam) can refuse only by undergoing an embarrassing ceremony called ḥalitzah (Deut. 25:5–10). Using an abundance of sources, which are discussed in an engaging manner, Weisberg shows that the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud radically redefined the patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal family structure described in the Bible, with its emphasis on the extended family. The rabbinic embrace of the nuclear family led to the rejection of levirate marriage as a way of life. Weisberg writes in her conclusion:

Rabbinic law rejects the idea that a family can be put back together through levirate. Individuals cannot be replaced by other individuals, even their brothers. Death ends marriage and a man’s obligation and ability to procreate. . . . Nonetheless, in response to the law in Deuteronomy, the rabbis preserved levirate in name. They transformed it, acknowledging that the levir and his sister-in-law are bound to each other as a result of their brother and husband’s death.

(p. 205)

According to Weisberg, the rabbis reinterpreted levirate marriage in order to keep it as much as possible in line with “regular” marriage, “formalizing it with a declaration of intent (ma’amar) and requiring the same waiting period as was required for the remarriage of all widows” (pp. 198–199; see also p. 224, note 60). The result was the formation of a new nuclear family and the preservation of rabbinic authority over it. Like Judith Hauptman in Rereading the Rabbis (1998)—a book whose influence Weisberg acknowledges on pp. 126–127—Weisberg is not judgmental of the rabbis, but rather emphasizes and analyzes how they reinterpreted Scripture.

Following a short discussion of the biblical concept of levirate marriage in Chapter 2, the core of the book and its main contribution to scholarship lie in Chapters 3–5, in which Weisberg deals almost exclusively with rabbinic literature. In Chapter 3, “Mapping the Family,” she creates a fascinating and well-researched “picture” of the family as the rabbis imagined it. After an interesting discussion of the laws of incest and how levirate marriage can be seen to contradict them (since Lev. 20:21 warns that the union of a man and his brother’s wife will be childless), Weisberg moves on to developing that rabbinic “picture” by comparing family rights and responsibilities in four areas of law: those of mourning, inheritance, testimony and levirate marriage. The narrowest definition of family is found in the laws of mourning, which are basically restricted to the nuclear family, while the widest definition is found in the laws concerning incest. Weisberg explains:

Mourning restricts an individual’s behavior for a specific period of time and requires that he or she be supported by the community. It also responds to a perceived emotional bond between the mourner and the deceased, a bond that renders the mourner incapable of everyday social and economic intercourse. Such an expectation of more distant relatives may be unreasonable and might leave the family with fewer supporters during the mourning period, placing a greater burden on the community...