Deuteronomy

The Levirate

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 91-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 91

Dictation Name: RR187AX91

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. The hour cometh and now is when the true worshipper will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. For the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we come again into Thy presence rejoicing in Thy mercies and Thy providential care. Thou knowest us and our needs better than we know them ourselves. Minister to us in Thy sovereign wisdom and grace, grant us those things that are needful and take from us those things that are not that we might with clarity of vision serve Thee, rejoice in Thee and extend the bounds of Thy kingdom all the days of our life. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 25:5-10. Our subject: The Levirate. Deuteronomy 25:5-10.

“ If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her.

6 And it shall be, that the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel.

7 And if the man like not to take his brother's wife, then let his brother's wife go up to the gate unto the elders, and say, My husband's brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel, he will not perform the duty of my husband's brother.

8 Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him: and if he stand to it, and say, I like not to take her;

9 Then shall his brother's wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother's house.

10 And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed.”

This is certainly one of the more upsetting texts in Biblical law for modern man. It goes against the grain for modern men and women. It must be granted that it is alien to almost everything in our culture so that to understand it we must know the context. It is interesting too that this law now has a remarkable bit of fresh attention. There is a new film which is quite highly rated entitled Holy Matrimony which is about an episode of this among a branch of the Amish in Canada. I hope before we are finished we will begin to see what is at stake here. In biblical law the family is the basic governmental unit. The family is the law center in a biblically governed society and it is the source of charity and education as well as of a great deal of government. The normal life is family life, unattached men, women and children are alien to such a culture. Church and state do not have the centrality belonging to the family. I recall when I was a teenager hearing a missionary discourse on the family in rural and interior China in which he said that in much of China there was no civil government, no state. Occasionally there would be tax collectors coming through to take things but government was at a minimum apart from the family. And there was good law, very little crime precisely because the family was responsible. If you tried to get work and you were unknown and your family was unknown no one would hire you because there would be no one to stand behind you and give an accounting if you were to stray.

For modern man society cannot exist without the state. In terms of God’s law society cannot exist without the family. Biblical law does acknowledge the need for civil society but the states importance is not equal to that of the family. Now in terms of this the perpetuation of the family is very important because it is the foundation of society. The book of Ruth gives us an illustration of the law of the Levirate. When Naomi and Ruth arrived in Bethlehem we read that all the city was moved about them, Elimelech, Naomi’s deceased husband had a parcel of land needing redemption. The kinsmen of Elimelech who had the land had a duty of marrying Ruth and rearing a successor and heir for Elimelech. That successor born of a Levirate marriage could be male or female. Lacking a qualifying male heir, girls could inherit as Numbers 36 makes clear. The Levirate marriage served a double purpose. First it kept the family intact by providing an heir and second it kept the land within the family. We’ll see subsequently its social importance. The Bible’s rigorous concern for the family name and the land clearly stress the material nature of biblical law, of biblical faith. Spiritual religion comes from Greek Neo-Platonism not from the Bible. The godly family lives an imprint on the physical creation because biblical faith is land oriented, work oriented and family based. A few of you who were at the last Seattle conference may recall that Dr. Thomas [unknown] spoke about the fact that ours is the only religion in the world with a God who says He works and requires work of people. This sets our faith totally apart from all other religions and a biblical faith creates a radically different culture just on that count.

Levirate is a word derived from the Latin ‘unknown] meaning brother in law. In some circles notably Orthodox Jewish and Hutterites, a branch of the Amish, the Levirate marriage is still practiced. In the New Testament there are references to it Matthew 22:23-28 and Luke 20:27-33. There was no compulsion to fulfill one’s Levirate duty. Verses eight through ten make this clear but there was shame in the failure. The reason for refusal we see in Ruth 4:1-8, in that instance the next to kin hoped to gain Elimelech’s land with the family becoming extinct but he did not want the land at the price of marrying Ruth. He had apparently hoped that Ruth as a foreigner would not qualify and he would then gain the land. The elders obviously thought otherwise. One scholar, Richard Clifford, calls attention in his comment to the place of the shoe in verses nine and ten and I quote:

“Legal deeds were often accompanied by gestures which showed dramatically the reality of the legal exchange. When one sold a piece of property, one handed one’s shoe to the buyer showing that the right to walk on the property as its owner had be given up to the buyer. Here the surviving brother let the land slip out of the family control. This is equivalent to transfer of ownership, hence the stripping off of the sandal. The law in Deuteronomic fashion is concerned with the land that the Lord gives, emphasizing how disgraceful it is not to pass the land on to legitimate descendants. “ Unquote.

Until recently, that is, until this century in many areas of the world land had been in the family for centuries and the protection of the family’s land was essential.

I know that in my father’s case the land had been in the family’s possession for at least two thousand years. Land meant freedom and for a man to be unwilling to perform his levirate duty meant a disavowal of his duty. He was a shoeless man or the unsandaled one. He had placed freedom and family low in his estimation. Now all this is alien to us because we’ve been at war against the relationship between the family and the land. Over most of history men have fought, made intense stands, put down their lives, to retain the family house or the family land because this to them meant freedom. And land was in Europe and in this country originally non-taxable. We saw a statement of that in this country, a man’s house is his castle, it’s his kingdom, no one can set foot on it or lay a tax on it. This is an aspect of this law, part of the background. The man who did not fulfill his family obligation with regards to the Levirate was deemed to have failed the family and deserved to have the widow spit in his face. Because for him individual goals was more important than family responsibility. To assume that this law tells us that the ancient Hebrews were less individualistic is a very assumption because its premise is that this law comes from folk customs rather than from God. As a matter of fact there was a greater stress on the person where the integrity of the land and the family was stressed. The use of the shoe to transfer property was an ancient one used in Northern Europe and elsewhere. A Levirate marriage was regarded as a continuation of the previous one. The firstborn son was then legally the son of the dead one or lacking a son, the daughter was the heir.

When Ruth gave birth to a son by Boaz it was legally Naomi’s son and it was Naomi’s duty to name the boy which she did, Obad. Now notice: Ruth was a foreigner she was not of Elimelech’s blood. She was the widow of his son but legally the line was through her. We can understand the continuing importance of this law to orthodox Jews when we see that Samson Raphael Hirsch in his commentary on the Pentateuch published first in 1966 and then 1982 gave a number of pages, twelve pages, to discussing this law. In verse five of our text child is properly son but if no son is born as we have seen the daughter succeeds. In Ruth there is an additional factor, not only is there no child but the land that had been alienated had to be redeemed. There is a very important aspect to this law that again eludes modern man. The need for a son or for a strong husband for the daughter points to an important aspect of marriage, protection and care. A wife or mother requires protection because a world being fallen is exploitive of the weak and the helpless. The woman is protected and the family land is maintained. We must remember that in the bible there is no property tax because we are told the earth is the Lords. This means that the family must be protected and the land to maintain freedom. The family property is in God’s sight comparable to an independent realm or kingdom. In the days of power for monarchies an unbroken secession meant safety for the kingdom.

So too for the family kingdom its freedom and succession as a realm had to be maintained. This points to an ancient custom not only among the Hebrews but among many, many Christian peoples which still survives, crowning the bride and the groom. They are now heads of a kingdom. In this context the family is the freedom center and its maintenance and perpetuation is critically important. Today this law is a curiosity but in a free family based society it would again have its place. Strong family based societies like the Scots practiced the Levirate far into the medieval era. They saw it as basic to freedom. We have a reference in Genesis 38:8-10 to this Levirate practiced early in history. Contrary to the contemporary view that this is a calloused treatment of women it was protective of women in that it assured the permanency of their protection when and where this practiced was maintained. Then there is finally another aspect of the loosing of the shoe to be considered. The man who refused to assume his Levirate responsibility was guilty of irresponsibility because his thinking was personal and self-centered. There were many such men and too few like Boaz. The many references to the bible to the needs of widows tells us that irresponsibility was commonplace. Especially if property were involved it was sometimes simpler to let the widow die and then redeem the property or inherit it. Then every man could operate in terms of self-interest and social cohesion would collapse.

The promise and the premise of this law is the family under God. This is a key fact, the family is in the Bible the law center under God and radically essential to societies life and welfare. Apart from this fact this law is not understandable. Men are God’s appointed guardians of his law and to remove by death the head of a household was to threaten society in that an agent of the law was missing and a law center, the family, was broken. In antiquity we find a variety of law centers from the family and father as in early Rome as in state as in Babylon. Many other things, the tribe, the clans, the city-state and so on were law centers in various cultures. In all instances outside the biblical revelation the power is in the hands of men at some level and is absolute. Freedom as a result did not exist. In Biblical law the law center is the family under God. The preservation of the family thus was the preservation of the law order at the most basic level. It made for a free society. It is because for modern man the law center is the state and man and the family are made increasingly powerless that the Levirate seems so remote to us. Everything in the modern state where the power center is at the top works to undermine the family, to undermine its protection, taxation, public education, all these things work to undermine the man as the law center under God. The family is made powerless and so the levirate seems remote to us because it says here is the center, the family. The modern condition is one of a radical separation of power from man and the family by means of statist laws and by taxation into impotence and irrelevance.

So the sense of shock that some people feel at this law is a revealing one. It tells us how far we have gone down the road from the family as the center of society to the state as the center. The result is the growing impotence of men, a railing continuing at patriarchal culture, meaning biblical culture, and with feminism and the rise of children’s rights we see an attempt to destroy the last relics of a family based law center. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee for Thy word. For Thy word tells us how far astray we are and how far power has shifted in our society away from Thee and Thy ordained instruments into the hands of godless agencies. Make us again mindful of what Thy will and word are for us that we may rebuild society and again have a new birth of freedom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Marrying the widow of your brother is that polygamy?

[Rushdoony] It was not regarded as polygamy in the bible and in biblical cultures because whether it was in Israel or in Scotland or among the Germans the premise was that the man therefore was taking the place of the deceased. He functioned as the deceased. So he was a duel person, legally, at that point. And this law had a very, very important part in some of these cultures as the Scottish and nobody has ever bothered to go back and examine why and what it accomplished. But it was there and it is interesting that at a number of points the Scottish Christians were remarkably faithful to biblical law.

So much so that the papacy at one point threatened to excommunicate all of Scotland, they would have a Passover lamb at Easter, they would celebrate the Resurrection or the Crucifixion with an actual Passover service. They were very literally minded at one thing after another in the law, including the Levirate and yet of course modern scholars seem to feel that that’s part of the history of Scotland that should be forgotten. So there’s no work done on it and it’s only occasionally and accidentally that you come across a reference to it. But it created a very strong culture that beginning from the first Edwards England made every attempt to destroy unsuccessfully. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question] In the Eastern Orthodox marriage ceremony I believe they still have a crown for the man and the wife it seems ironic that where they practice that those countries have been socialist for the past seventy years.

[Rushdoony] The Eastern Orthodox church still does have the crowning and the church of Armenia still has the crowning and several others do. And its’ been in the background of many other groups. But the original meaning has been forgotten because it signified literally, that’s what crowning does, that they were a king and queen! They had great powers under God, that their home and their land nobody could trespass on without violating God’s law and arousing the anger of any and all at such an offense. So when James Otis said a man’s house is his castle he was echoing an ancient tradition, an ancient legal fact which we have seen radically destroyed.

[Question] Would the Levirate relationship only continue until such time as there was an heir?

[Rushdoony] No. That was the goal, to produce an heir, but the woman was then under the protection of the man who performed the Levirate service. So she had a claim on his protection at all times.

[Question] But there was no right of remarriage to that widow then?

[Rushdoony] No, no. She could if there were an heir by her first husband you see, than she was free. But she had the duty to maintain the family and to care for the little one and so on. It was something wherever it existed which was essentially and primarily in Hebrew and European cultures because of the Bible regarded as an important aspect of moral duty and an important aspect of maintaining the integrity of society because you were a law center. We have a faint echo of this in the citizen’s right of arrest. You were a law center still in that you can arrest a man if you find a crime being committed. So we have forgotten how important the idea of the family as the law center was once in society. We are told that in Old Testament times when in Israel the law was faithfully kept houses were built of stone but they only had a door made of cloth because there was such security. When men were the center of the law they didn’t wait for somebody to come in from the outside to take care of crime. Yes?

[Question] What was the Hebrew name for the house of him that had the shoe loosed, did they have a name?

[Rushdoony] That was it, it was a Hebrew term.

[Question] You don’t know what the Hebrew term is?

[Rushdoony] No I don’t at the moment. But you can see that it meant that if you were unwilling to meet your responsibilities there you were held in contempt as a self-centered person unwilling to assume governmental responsibilities because that’s what it was in essence. Well if there are no further questions or comments let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for Thy word which opens up to us what the world should be and what we can be under Thy law. We thank Thee that in Jesus Christ we have been set on a path to lead us to such a law order, such a law center. We thank Thee that Thou hast called us as men to so great a task. Bless us therein we beseech Thee and now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.