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wife (if he have died childless), and raising up seed unto his brother: this, not in the nature of a prohibition, but of an exceptional injunction or command. (Deut. xxv. 5—10.)
(v.) We have an exception to the above exception, forbidding its being extended to the taking the wife's sister in the case of the above injunction working (as in one special case it might work), to the result of a brother, in taking his deceased brother's widow, taking also, by the same act, his own wife's sister, and thus, if his own wife were still alive, having the two sisters together as wives. For this would be the case, were there no exceptional prohibition, when two brothers had married two sisters, and when, though one of the brothers had died childless, yet both sisters were alive. Then there comes in the exception: "Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her. . . . . .beside the other in her lifetime" (verse 18); as if it were said. In no case—no, not when the law of the Levirate would otherwise require it—no, not when the saving of a house in Israel from extinction would otherwise demand it—shall a man take his wife's sister, his own wife, her sister, being yet alive: where, too, we may observe, that the parallelism in the cases of the two brothers and the two sisters is strictly and exactly maintained; for the woman in no case could take a second brother, the other being alive; for her husband, the first brother, must be dead before the law of the Levirate could operate at all; therefore the wife's sister could not (even when two brothers had married two sisters) take her husband's brother beside the other in his lifetime, and thus the wife's sister is exactly equally restrained from taking the sister's husband, when the circumstances would lead to it by a man taking "a wife to her sister. . . . . .beside the other in her lifetime."
Thus, too, it is clear that the law of this 18th verse is a law of prohibition, not of relaxation, and therefore naturally
