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 theMishnaafford 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 exceptionalLeviricallaw (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,afterthe Levitical prohibitions were given), which commanded thenext kinsmanto 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 shecould not be vexed, the widow’s brother-in-law was free to marry her, for the purpose specified in the Levirate law.”

“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 shecould not be vexed, the widow’s brother-in-law was free to marry her, for the purpose specified in the Levirate law.”

And again:—

“Since this first suggested itself to us, we have learnt (see Tract x. p. 21, of the Marriage Law Association) that theMishna, treating of the civil lawof the Jews as to marrying the deceased brother’s wife, says that he may not marry herif she is his own wife’s sister, and, moreover, that the prohibition holds goodafterthe wife’s death. It is possible that this latter part of the tradition may be akin to what our Lord called (S. Mark vii. 9) ‘your own tradition,’ and so may have tended to ‘frustrate the commandment of God,’ in Lev. xviii. 18, by perplexing the interpretation of the words, ‘in her life-time.”

I may add, however, as shewing my argument to be an independent witness to the same sense and application of Leviticus xviii. 18, that I had no knowledge of either of these statements when I sketched out the argument of the preceding letter.

I have said that I have no need to enter into the question of the “one hour” mentioned in the Mishna. And this is certainly true, because the question which I have been considering is not whether, if a wife’s sister be forbidden at all she is forbidden for ever by both being alive together at a certain time but simply whether the whole matter involved in the words “in her life-time” be not explained and accounted for by its being a prohibition, narrowing the requirements of the law of the Levirate, and nothing more. But it may be added that the statement of the Mishna as to the “one hour” is certainly rather confirmatory than not of the second sister being wholly forbidden, except under that law’s provision in the case of the death of the one previous to the widowhood of the other, because if the being forbidden for one hour forbids for ever, the second sister, whether herself a virgin or the widow of a stranger, being (like the brother’s widow left a widow in her sister’s life-time) marriageable to any other man than her brother-in-law, during all the time of her sister’s married life, (she, I say,) would be all that time forbidden to him. This would answer certainly to the one hour, and if so, under the Rule of the Mishna, she would be forbidden to him for ever, which brings us to the general prohibition under the general law.

Whether the above inference of the Mishna be a legitimate one from the words “in her life-time,” that is, that the forbidding should depend for ever upon the state of things at the time of the brother’s death (as Dr. M’Caul expresses it), I need not determine. Mr. Perry, in one of the extracts above, seems to think it might rather be one of the additions by which the Jews frustrated “the Word of God by their tradition,” and possibly it was so. But at least we may say that there appears to be a weighty moral consideration to support the view of the prohibition extending from one hour to the future life. Because thus, in the case of a man finding his brother’s wife a widow, being his own wife’s sister, and perchance preferring her to his own wife, he might otherwise be tempted to get rid of his own wife,by divorce (so easily obtainable as divorce became among the Jews) or otherwise, if such after-release set him at liberty to marry his brother’s wife, being a widow: a temptation be it observed not occurring as to any other woman left a widow by his brother’s death, because the tacit sanction given to polygamy under the Jewish dispensation would in that case render it unnecessary to obtain release from his own wife at all in order to take her. If the brother had died childless, he would be enjoined to take her, irrespectively of his own wife being alive. If not childless, he could never take her at all. And this moral reason is not perhaps wholly unworthy of consideration as applying to the general question of marriage with a wife’s sister in a state of things in which polygamy is forbidden. If the greater intimacy arising between a man and his wife’s sister might, if unrestrained by the knowledge that she can never under any circumstances become his wife, tend to produce attachment, who shall say it is not a merciful and a wholesome restraint, that she should be forbidden to him for ever? And this restraint, be it remarked, would be wholly lost under the change in our law now sought.

The drift of the objection considered in the Postscript may receive an illustration from that great moral drama, in the plot and conduct of which horror at the incestuous connection of the king with his brother’s widow bears so prominent a part. The case of the objector who would make the law of the Levirate a dispensation for Christians, is just as if Claudius king of Denmark had pleaded that law, though his brother had not died childless (for no modern legislation proposes to regard this limitation), as a reason for taking to wife his brother’s widow;—or, as if, yet further, had Queen Gertrude died, leaving a sister, he should plead again that same law (for all modern legislation proposes to go to this extent), to sanction his afterward taking her also to wife. Surely all this, as the king says of another matter, is “absurd to reason.”

It is of much importance to mark clearly how absolute, upon Dr. M’Caul’s reading of Leviticus xviii. 18, is the contradiction involved. I add, therefore:—Let it be well observed that a time beyond that expressed by the words “in her life-time” must be understood to be of the essence of all the prohibitions. That is to say (and the awful importance of the matter requires it to be stated plainly), that it is incest and not adultery which is the subject of the prohibitions throughout. A man is prohibited from marrying his Mother not merely during his Father’s lifetime, but always—his Sister, not merely, if she be married, and, if so, during her husband’s life-time, but always. So of the Brother’s Wife, and the rest. Therefore according to the interpretation insisted upon, the collision is, as stated in the text, a complete contradiction; a universal negative on the one side met by a particular affirmative on the other, just as if one should say, negatively, “No horses are black,” and then immediately add, affirmatively, “Some horses are black.” For, the statements drawn out in full, including the case by parity of reasoning from verse 16, would stand thus:—

Thou shalt not take thy Brother’s Wife, whether in thy Brother’s life-time or not.

Thou shalt not take thy Wife’s Sister, whether in her Sister’s life-time or not.

Thou mayest take thy Wife’s Sister, if it be not in her Sister’s life-time.

Such is the over-riding demanded by Dr. M’Caul’s position, and necessary to the argument if this 18th verse is to be made in any way available for the purpose of the promoters of the change in our marriage law. The improbability of such a contradiction within two verses, including an assumed change in the subject matter, from incest to adultery, in a continuous catalogue of the enormities denounced, can, as it appears to me, hardly be exaggerated.

There is one consideration further to which it may be well to call attention, viz., that thetranslationof Lev. xviii. 18, is not to be confused with itsinterpretation. Dr. M’Caul naturally insists much upon the translation, and in addition to his own critical judgment, allowed to be of great weight from his known eminence as an Hebrew Scholar, he gives many authorities in favour of the rendering as it stands in the text of our authorized version. Still it is to be remarked that the authorities whom he cites for the translation are by no means at one with him as to the interpretation. This point will be found very fully treated of in the second letter of the present Lord Chancellor to the Dean of Westminster, printed in 1861,[40]and, if I remember rightly, it was also examined and the result put very forcibly by the Bishop of Exeter in the postscript to his letter to the late Bishop of Lichfield, published, I believe, in 1860, where it is observantly noted that of all our Reformers cited by Dr. M’Caul as having accepted the authorized version as to the rendering of Lev. xviii. 18, there is not one who has gone with him in the application of it which he advocates, inasmuch as they have all either explicitly or implicitly received our table of prohibited degrees: a proof that even from Dr. M’Caul’s premise, as to the translation, they have not come to his conclusion as to the interpretation. And it is plainly in the interpretation, not in the mere translation, that the above-mentioned contradiction is involved.

[5]Speech of Vice-Chancellor Sir W. P. Wood. p. 5.

[7]Against profane dealing with Holy Matrimony, by the Rev. John Keble, pp. 12, 13. J. H. Parker. 1849.

[8]Ibid. pp. 13, 14.

[9]Letter to Rev. W. H. Lyall, by Rev. A. M’Caul, D.D., pp. 1–4. Wertheim, Mackintosh, and Hunt. 1859.

[10]Speech of Sir W. P. Wood, pp. 5, 6.

[11]Dr. M’Caul’s Letter to Sir W. P. Wood, 1860, p. 55.

[12]See Note at the end of Appendix.

[13a]Appendix A.

[13b]Canon 99.—“None to marry within the degrees prohibited.” “And all such marriages so made shall be judged incestuous and unlawful.”

A Table of kindred and affinity, wherein whosoever are related are forbidden in Scripture and our laws to marry together.—Book of Common Prayer.

[14]Letter, p. 55.

[15]St. Matt. xxii. 24.

[16]It may be useful just to state that the law termed the law of the Levirate is that law laid down in Deut. xxv. 5–10, that in case a Jew dying childless, his brother should take his wife and raise up seed unto his brother.

[18]Letter to Rev. W. H. Lyall, p. 14.

[20]Letter to Vice-Chancellor Sir W. Page Wood, p. 29–31.

[21]Appendix B.

[23]Lev. xviii., 20–30.

[24]See Dr. Pusey’s Evidence before the Royal Commission, First Report, p. 37, questions 431–3.

[30]It is, moreover, evident that something of the kind of the law of the Levirate was a usage of the Patriarchal times, from the history recorded as to the sons of Judah in the book of Genesis.

[32]St. Luke xxiv. 27.

[36]Appendix C.

[40]Second Letter of Vice-Chancellor Sir W. Page Wood, pp. 47–63.

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