The only two passages which I have met with taking the same line of
argument with that of the foregoing letter are the following. In an
appendix to the Speech of Vice-Chancellor Sir W. Page Wood, Feb. 1st,
1860, I find this comment upon the statements in the Mishna:—
“The passages from the _Mishna_ afford singular support to the view
which the Bishop of Oxford, at the late meeting, stated to be held by
some divines in America, viz., that the difficult 18th verse of the
18th chapter of Leviticus was, in fact, a special prohibition against
a wife’s sister being married to her brother-in-law, even when the
exceptional _Levirical_ law (or law by which the brother-in-law was
to raise up seed to his deceased brother) might otherwise have
appeared to supersede the general code of the 18th chapter.”
In an article recently reprinted from the Church Review, of February,
1861, understood to be from the pen of the Rev. T. W. Perry, I find also
this:—
“May it not be, then, that the prohibition simply related to the
(apparently) Patriarchal requirement (see Gen. xxxviii. 8), enforced
in Deut. xxv. 5–10 (that is, _after_ the Levitical prohibitions were
given), which commanded the _next kinsman_ to marry the widow of one
who died without issue, in order to preserve the inheritance? For if
the next kinsman was a brother of the deceased, the duty of raising
up seed to his brother first devolved upon him. But he might refuse
to perform it. In that instance he underwent a kind of punishment.
The widow loosed his shoe and spat in his face before the elders of
his city (Deut. xxv. 8 and 9), and he became stigmatized as ‘the
house of him that hath his shoe loosed’ (v. 10). This liberty to
refuse (see also Ruth iii. 12 and iv. 6) may have been a Divine
relaxation of the Patriarchal rule, designed, perhaps, to render more
effectual the prohibition in Lev. xviii. 18. But it may not
improbably be, that the penalty attached was meant to secure the
custom from contempt, by deterring the kinsman from excusing himself
on grounds which the law of the Levirate (_i.e._, the law of raising
up seed to the deceased brother) did not mean to recognize.”
Then, after some remarks upon the jealousy or vexation likely to arise,
the writer continues:—
“May it not, therefore, have been that God designed, in Lev. xviii.
18, to provide against this evil, which was very likely to attend
upon the performance of the existing rule, and of his own command
(then to be given) touching the marriage of the deceased brother’s
wife?
“Yet, how does this explanation meet the difficulty arising from the
alleged permission contained in the words (v. 18) ‘in her life-time?’
Thus—If the next kinsman’s wife were already dead, or if she died
before the kinsman’s part had been done to the widow, or after that
part had been done by another kinsman, who had died leaving the widow
still childless then, as she _could not be vexed_, the widow’s
brother-in-law was free to marry her, for the purpose specified in
the Levirate law.”