In this way, because Karabakh society is a society where women's social status and welfare depend on their relationship to men, the practice of
levirate fulfils the function of protecting its widowed women.
The more likely reason for God's wrath is the means that Onan used to get around fulfilling the
Levirate law.
Now with the possible exception of Abba Shaul, tannaim took Deuteronomy's yibbum law at face value: "her levir [=brother-in-law] shall go in unto her and make her his wife and perform his
levirate duty by her....
In a statement that must have sounded shocking to his audience, he says: "For the Lord himself opened the Kingdom of heaven to eunuchs, He himself being a eunuch." (41) And Tertullian was aware that eunuchs caused "gender trouble." In the context of a discussion of
levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-6), he gives as a reason for that historic custom that "eunuchs and the unfruitful were despised." But that command was no longer valid, Tertullian argued, and one of the reasons he gave was that "Now no longer are eunuchs despised; rather they have merited grace and are invited into the kingdom of heaven." (42) That is, with Jesus words in Matt.
Feminist biblical exegesis, however, rightly brings in other possibilities of interpretation, such as the seven-fold
Levirate marriage mentioned in Mark 12:18-27, which legitimized "chain marriage" under the Torah; cf.
Kass suggests that the crime Onan (and, in his way, Judah) committed was to disregard the custom of
levirate marriage, the duty to raise up a child for the dead brother.
Marital histories were used to estimate de facto and de jure levels of polygyny (2) in terms of the numbers of wives ever married, surviving, and resident, and to identify cases of marital dissolution and marriage by
levirate to a deceased brother's or son's wives.
As my statistics from 1995-2000 show that either partner in a first marriage is quite likely to die before the other has reached middle age,
levirate marriage, often merely a theoretical possibility in other parts of New Guinea, is very common where the husband dies first; if the wife dies, there is no obstacle to the husband finding a second wife among her sisters, or even marrying two sisters at once--a practice that is abhorrent to many highlanders, for structural reasons.
The
levirate which encourages one of her husband's kin to marry her, for the most part benefited Igbo widows as well as their husbands' lineages.
(7.) In Islam, the custom of
levirate provides that the wives of a deceased man are to be passed to the brothers of the family.
In earlier times, perhaps one of his brothers would have inherited Chief Ukwuegbu's wives, but by 1985
levirate had become very unusual, and Chief Ukwuegbu had no living brothers in any case.
(104) The leading Talmudic precedent for this view is the ruling that brothers, whose mother converted to Judaism during pregnancy, are not included in the law of
levirate marriage and halitzah but are, nevertheless, forbidden to marry each other's wives.