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probable this makes it, if there be any other reasonable sense or application of the second passage not involving this contradiction, that such sense and application should be the true one, and there should be thus no over-riding at all between those two verses.
Is there then any such reasonable sense and application of the prohibition of the 18th verse? I think there is. To see what it is, go back to the exception under the law of the Levirate,[1] and ask whether the application of that law might not involve a man's marrying two sisters. Undoubtedly it might. Suppose two brothers to have married two sisters, and the one brother to die, leaving no child, if, by the Leviratical law the brother, as he would do under that law simply, took his brother's widow to raise up seed unto his brother, he would also be taking to wife his own wife's sister, and this, it would seem under the injunction in Deuteronomy, he would not only be permitted but enjoined to do. But was this to be without exception? I answer. No! If his own wife, the sister of the other were still alive, the Almighty did not intend this rule to be carried out in such case. He, the surviving brother, in that contingency, should not "take a wife to her sister to vex her, . . . beside the other in her life-time." The prohibition of the 18th verse of the xviii. chapter of Leviticus comes in. It comes, in the translation of the authorized version. It comes, in the sense contended for, as prohibitory if both sisters are alive together. It comes, as tacitly sanctioning the union if they are not; but it comes as limited in its application to this one case and one contemplated contingency, as God's own exception touching the two sisters "in their life-time:"—His exception, as to both sisters alive together; the exception to the exception contained in the
- ↑ It may be useful just to state that the law termed the law of the Levirate is that law laid down in Dent. xxv. 5—10, that in case a Jew dying childless, his brother should take his wife and raise up seed unto his brother.
