LEVIRATE. - The duty to marry the widow of one's own brother, who has died without children. The custom is common to many primitive peoples, and finds its reason in the fact that two brothers were considered as a single being. Among the Hebrews, the brother of the deceased on whom the duty of the levirate falls is called jābhlām. The custom is already documented in the patriarchal era (Gen. 38:8 ff.). The first son born from the marriage of the widow to the brother-in-law bears the name of the woman's first husband, because the levirate had precisely the purpose of ensuring offspring to the man who died in his virile age, after marriage. Thus the inheritance of the deceased was assured to the direct line of descent. In the absence of the second brother, the obligation of the levirate passed to the third and to the other brothers; the episode in the book of Ruth (4:3 ff.) shows that, if not the obligation, at least the right and the propriety of such a custom also existed for less close relatives.
The law of the levirate appears in Deuteronomy, where the manner in which the brother-in-law who evades the levirate is to be treated is described (Deut. 25:5-10): in the presence of the elders the widow removes his sandal and spits in his face, saying: "So shall it be done to the man who does not rebuild his brother's house." The brother-in-law is then called ḥalūṣ haṇṇā'al, "he who has been deprived of the sandal" (to remove the sandal means to renounce a right).
The levirate was still in use at the time of Jesus (Mt. 22:23-27; Mk. 12:18-23; Lk. 20:27-32). In the Miṣnāh, the treatise Jēbhāmāth deals with the levirate. In time the rabbis themselves, because of the changed circumstances of life, forbade marrying the widowed sister-in-law, retaining as an obligation the ceremony of which the book of Ruth speaks.