# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S322
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

322 On Matrimonial Matters.

...widow should be left in possession of the inheritance of her deceased husband (compare Numbers 36), and that the genealogical registers might be carried forward, without the loss of any name of the principal persons, down to the times of Christ, than that God commanded the surviving brother to marry the bereaved sister-in-law — and this under threat of punishment, since otherwise, by mere dispensation, the great or small inheritance which God himself had allotted at the first division of the land would either have been advanced or hindered by the levirate.

3. Leviticus 18:18 reads literally: "You shall also not take a wife to her sister, to be a rival, to uncover her nakedness, besides her, or in addition to her, in her lifetime." One may refer this prohibition to polygamy or plural marriage in general; only, on account of Deuteronomy 21:15, one is compelled to assume that Moses bore with the hardness of the people's hearts in this matter, especially since Christ traces and grounds monogamy not on Moses's law but on God's original ordinance, just as the Talmudists themselves sufficiently testify that polygamy was tolerated among the Jews. Let us keep to the words as they stand. God here forbids simultaneous marriage with two sisters, to which the example of the patriarch Jacob might easily have given occasion — just as verse 11, following Abraham's example and an evil heathen custom, declares marriage with a stepsister by a common father especially impermissible, although verse 9 states the same regarding marriage between step-siblings in general. (Compare "Der Lutheraner," loc. cit., p. 7, col. 1; p. 6, col. 1.) That marrying a wife's sister after the former wife's death is against God's commandment follows irrefutably from verse 16, since the same degree of kinship holds with a wife's sister as with a brother's wife, for which reason verse 18 did not need to deal with the matter separately. If one wished to restrict forbidden marriages to those specifically listed in chapters 18 and 20,*) the most absurd and harmful consequences would follow — namely, that many marriages, for example between a grandmother and her grandson, between a grandfather and his great-granddaughter, etc. (even between a father and his own daughter?), would have to be permitted. (Compare "Der Lutheraner," loc. cit., p. 6 ff.) That Luther, too, in his later writings no longer proceeded according to the persons named in the Bible, as he still did in 1522, but rather according to degrees of kinship, so that the marriage prohibitions extend likewise to relationships of the same kind not literally specified —

*) Note. It is especially the devoted servants of the Papacy who have adopted this from the Jewish rabbis, so that fines might be exacted for granting such marriages of which Moses makes no mention. — From the fact, moreover, that the latter [Moses] mentions as forbidden only that of marrying two sisters at the same time, since marriage to two wives was otherwise still tolerated under the Old Testament, the conclusion may already be drawn that marriage with a sister after the wife's death was likewise not permissible.