Essay for Deuteronomy 25:5

A number of stories and laws in the Bible clarify how important the continuity of the generations, as represented by carrying on a man’s name, was considered in ancient Israel. Here the law provides for the widow of a man who dies without heirs to provide one, through the institution of “levirate marriage”—whereby the man’s brother marries her, and the subsequent offspring bears the deceased brother’s name. This institution, applied to a more distant relative, vividly appears in the book of Ruth, which in fact contains a ceremony scene (4:1–11) of the kind set forth here.