We also find the levirate among the Redskins, particularly the Chippeways; and at Nicaragua, where the widow belongs either to the brother or nearest relative of her deceased husband.[863]
With the Ostiaks, the next brother of the husband is obliged to marry his widow or widows; for the Ostiaks, like the Redskins, often take for wives a whole set of sisters.[864] It is the same with the Kirghis, and in general with the nomad Mongols.[865] The Afghans also make it a duty of the brother-in-law to marry his sister-in-law, on her becoming a widow.[866]
The Code of Manu imposes the levirate even on the brother of a betrothed man who dies: “When the husband of a young girl happens to die after the betrothal, let the brother of the husband take her for wife.”[867] The object of this legal precept in India is to give a posterity to the deceased brother; for the following verse seems to limit the duration of the cohabitation with the widowed fiancée, and it seems indeed that all commerce is to cease after the first pregnancy.[868]
We will now consider the Hebrew levirate, which is only a particular case of a very general fact.
We find the levirate mentioned twice in the Bible. At first in Genesis: “Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother.”[869] Again, in Deuteronomy: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no son, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger; her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. And it shall be, that the first-born whom she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not blotted out of Israel.”[870] The Hebrew levirate was therefore a sort of obligatory and fictitious adoption of a nephew by the deceased uncle. We shall soon see that in all primitive or barbarous societies this adoption is largely practised, and that it is absolutely equivalent to a real filiation.
The verses which follow inform us that, with the Hebrews, the levirate was rather a moral than a legal obligation; the brother-in-law could even refuse it; but in refusing, he incurred the public contempt, and had to submit to a degrading ceremony: “And if the man like not to take his brother’s wife, then his brother’s wife shall go up to the gate unto the elders, and say, My husband’s brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel, he will not perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto me; then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him: and if he stand, and say, I like not to take her; then shall his brother’s wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and she shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that doth not build up his brother’s house. And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed.”[871]
In India the principal object of the levirate, applied to the widowed fiancée, was to furnish the deceased man with a fictitious son, who could perform for him the sacrifices to the manes, a duty of the highest importance in the religion of Brahma. For the Hebrews, a much more practical people than the Hindoos, the levirate had only an earthly object—that of keeping up the name or family of the deceased, and all that belonged to it. It may be compared with the obligation imposed at Athens on the nearest relative in the masculine line to marry the heiress, or to supplement at need the impotence of the husband.
The old practice of the levirate still exists in Abyssinia with this curious detail, that it is applied during the lifetime of the husband if he has been the victim of an accident, frequent in the Abyssinian wars, of emasculation. The mutilated husband, being thus struck with what might be called “virile death,” his brother succeeds him in his marital rights and duties.[872]
Some sociologists, too much given to theorise, have tried to prove that the levirate was a remnant of polyandry. Certainly the levirate is practised under a polyandric régime, but polyandry has never been more than an exceptional mode of marriage, and there is hardly any trace of it among the New Caledonians, the Redskins, the Mongols, the Afghans, the Hindoos, the Hebrews, the Abyssinians, etc., who, all of them, practise different varieties of levirate.
The much more natural reasons that I have given above appear to me quite sufficient and more probable.