37
APPENDIX A.
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."
And again:—
