I have said that I have no need to enter into the question of the “one
hour” mentioned in the Mishna. And this is certainly true, because the
question which I have been considering is not whether, if a wife’s sister
be forbidden at all she is forbidden for ever by both being alive
together at a certain time but simply whether the whole matter involved
in the words “in her life-time” be not explained and accounted for by its
being a prohibition, narrowing the requirements of the law of the
Levirate, and nothing more. But it may be added that the statement of
the Mishna as to the “one hour” is certainly rather confirmatory than not
of the second sister being wholly forbidden, except under that law’s
provision in the case of the death of the one previous to the widowhood
of the other, because if the being forbidden for one hour forbids for
ever, the second sister, whether herself a virgin or the widow of a
stranger, being (like the brother’s widow left a widow in her sister’s
life-time) marriageable to any other man than her brother-in-law, during
all the time of her sister’s married life, (she, I say,) would be all
that time forbidden to him. This would answer certainly to the one hour,
and if so, under the Rule of the Mishna, she would be forbidden to him
for ever, which brings us to the general prohibition under the general
law.
Whether the above inference of the Mishna be a legitimate one from the
words “in her life-time,” that is, that the forbidding should depend for
ever upon the state of things at the time of the brother’s death (as Dr.
M’Caul expresses it), I need not determine. Mr. Perry, in one of the
extracts above, seems to think it might rather be one of the additions by
which the Jews frustrated “the Word of God by their tradition,” and
possibly it was so. But at least we may say that there appears to be a
weighty moral consideration to support the view of the prohibition
extending from one hour to the future life. Because thus, in the case of
a man finding his brother’s wife a widow, being his own wife’s sister,
and perchance preferring her to his own wife, he might otherwise be
tempted to get rid of his own wife, by divorce (so easily obtainable as
divorce became among the Jews) or otherwise, if such after-release set
him at liberty to marry his brother’s wife, being a widow: a temptation
be it observed not occurring as to any other woman left a widow by his
brother’s death, because the tacit sanction given to polygamy under the
Jewish dispensation would in that case render it unnecessary to obtain
release from his own wife at all in order to take her. If the brother
had died childless, he would be enjoined to take her, irrespectively of
his own wife being alive. If not childless, he could never take her at
all. And this moral reason is not perhaps wholly unworthy of
consideration as applying to the general question of marriage with a
wife’s sister in a state of things in which polygamy is forbidden. If
the greater intimacy arising between a man and his wife’s sister might,
if unrestrained by the knowledge that she can never under any
circumstances become his wife, tend to produce attachment, who shall say
it is not a merciful and a wholesome restraint, that she should be
forbidden to him for ever? And this restraint, be it remarked, would be
wholly lost under the change in our law now sought.