MARRIAGE AMONG THE ANCIENT ISRAELITES. 329 



Terah 



! 



I III 



Abraham Nahor Haran. Sarah 



(mar. Sarah). (mar. Milcah). (mar. Abraham). 



Ishmael. Isaac Bethuel. Milcah 



(mar. Rebekah). (mar. Nahor). 



I I I I 



Mahalath Esaii Jacob Rebekah Laban 



(mar. Esau), (mar. Mahalath). (mar. Leah (mar. Isaac). 



and Rachel). 



I I 



Leah Rachel 



(mar. Jacob). 



That the Israelites married relations on the father's side is thus 

 indisputable, but if they were exogamous, as we must believe 

 them to have been, since they had marriage by capture and mar- 

 riage with the form of capture, marriages between blood-relations 

 were forbidden; hence we must conclude that relations on the 

 father's side were not accounted blood-relations, and that kinship 

 and descent were traced through mothers exclusively. 



All the above cases, and that of Amram, father of Moses, who 

 married his father's sister (Exodus, vi, 20), are anterior to the 

 Levitical law, which forbade marriage with a sister-german, or 

 by the same father, and also with a father's sister ; and so, had it 

 been then in force, would have prevented the marriage of Abraham 

 with Sarah, and that of Amram with Jochebed. The Levitical 

 law was therefore an innovation, since it prohibited marriages 

 which had formerly been allowed. It also prohibited marriage 

 with a brother's wife, which is generally taken as meant to in- 

 clude his widow ; but as in Deuteronomy, xxv, 5, a man is enjoined 

 to marry his brother's widow, if the brother had died childless, it 

 seems probable that the prohibition in Leviticus, xviii, 10, was 

 directed against that form of polyandry in which the associated 

 husbands are brothers, which, as we have before shown, the Israel- 

 ites certainly at one time had. 



As we have said, the Levitical law changed the existing cus- 

 tom ; yet, strangely enough, long after the supposed date of its 

 promulgation, we find Tamar, in the affair with her half-brother 

 Amnon, saying (I Samuel, xiii, 13) : " Speak to the king, for he 

 will not withhold me from thee," just as if marriage with a sister- 

 german was quite customary and had not been forbidden. From 

 this we are driven to conclude that the Levitical law is misplaced 

 chronologically — a conclusion which M. Ren an seems also to have 

 arrived at.* It seems probable that the Levitical code was really 



* History of the People of Israel, vol. i, p. 166; vol. ii, pp. 169, 298. 

 vol. xlii. — 22 



