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.
APPENDIX C.
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.”
NOTE TO PAGE 12.
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 life time, 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 the translation of Lev. xviii. 18, is not to be confused with its interpretation. 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.