Argument XXI.
The surviving brother, by the Mosaic law, was to Raise Seed to a deceased brother who left a widow childless, to perpetuate his name and family, and inherit his goods and estate, or be degraded: and, if the issue he begat was a male child, it assumed the name of the deceased. The Indian custom[[83]] looks the very same way; yet it is in this as in their law of blood—the eldest brother can redeem.
Although a widow is bound, by a strict penal law, to mourn the death of her husband for the space of three or four years; yet, if she be known to lament her loss with a sincere heart, for the space of a year, and her circumstances of living are so strait as to need a change of her station—and the elder brother of her deceased husband lies with her, she is thereby exempted {189} from the law of mourning, has a liberty to tie up her hair, anoint and paint herself in the same manner as the Hebrew widow, who was refused by the surviving brother of her deceased husband, became free to marry whom she pleased.
The warm-constitutioned young widows keep their eye so intent on this mild beneficent law, that they frequently treat their elder brothers-in-law with spirituous liquors till they intoxicate them, and thereby decoy them to make free, and so put themselves out of the reach of that mortifying law. If they are disappointed, as it sometimes happens, they fall on the men, calling them Hoobuk Wakse, or Skoobále, Hassé kroopha, “Eunuchus præputio detecto, et pene brevi;” the most degrading of epithets. Similar to the Hebrew ladies, who on the brother’s refusal loosed his shoe from his foot, and spit in his face, (Deut. xxv. 9.); and as some of the Rabbies tell us they made water in the shoe, and threw it with despite in his face, and then readily went to bed to any of his kinsmen, or most distant relations of the same line that she liked best; as Ruth married Boaz. Josephus, to palliate the fact, says she only beat him with the shoe over his face. David probably alludes to this custom, Psal. lx. 8. “Over Edom I will cast out my shoe,” or detraction.
Either by corruption, or misunderstanding that family-kissing custom of the Hebrews, the corrupt Cheerake marry both mother and daughter at once; though, unless in this instance, they and all the other savage nations observe the degrees of consanguinity in a stricter manner than the Hebrews, or even the Christian world. The Cheerake do not marry their first or second cousins;[[84]] and it is very observable, that the whole tribe reckon a friend in the same rank with a brother, both with regard to marriage, and any other affair in social life. This seems to evince that they copied from the stable and tender friendship between Jonathan and David; especially as the Hebrews had legal, or adopted, as well as natural brothers. {190}