David Latane wrote:
>All I'm going to say is that if my brother dies I'm
>not marrying his wife even if my family has to be
>known forever as "the house of him who has no sandal."
>(Deuteronomy 25).
>
>Follow the Gourd! No, the Shoe!
>
>
I think it's Genesis where this appalling incident occurs. So-called
Levirate Marriage. The husband dies, the brother is OBLIGATED to "go in
unto" the widow (after he's married her, of course) and generate
children who are actually the first husband's, it's all done in the
first husband's name. In other words, thou shalt service thy
sister-in-law. You can always spot a nomadic culture where wealth was
measured by livestock.
So you get a rebel like Onan who "spilled [his seed] on the ground."
What'd he do? Well, he didn't finish what started, let's say. And,
says the text, God slew him. How long after? Early death was a fact of
life in ancient cultures where emergency rooms were poorly staffed.
One of the legal loopholes that developed was that if the brother didn't
want to marry the widow, she could release him by casting down a shoe on
the ground. A shoe? I don't know why, but it was presumed to be an insult.
There's a remarkably good novel by the late Chaim Potok called _In The
Beginning_ where the coarser older brother of a young man murdered in
Poland right after World War I has followed the letter of the law and
married the brother's widow, who he loved anyway. Their child inherits
not the biological father's stolid and somewhat pugnacious disposition
but the artistic and scholarly mind and spirit of the uncle he never
knew, and there is a strange connection between them culminating in a
curious reconciliation between the two dead brothers and their by now
middle-aged son/nephew in the landscaped museum that was made of
Bergen-Belsen.
Eerie book.
ken
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Kenneth Wolman
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