11 - Jacob's marriages

Summary

Mosaic law about marriage was formulated in opposition to that of the Egyptians. But it modified the ability, indeed the injunction, to marry close kin very little, only in respect of siblings by the same parents, the uterine form of which had been permitted to earlier Israelites. By a curious twist of fate a code which allowed close marriage and, at least in the incident of the daughters of Zelophehad, associated this with the retention of property allocated to women, was utilised by later Europeans to prohibit those very unions. As a result of the spread of Christianity the code became part of the ideological umbrella of European religious law and to a lesser extent of secular practice. Canon law and popular debate both refer to Biblical precedent, usually that of the Old Testament since the New provides relatively little by way of guidance on this aspect of family life. But despite the common ideology, patterns of marriage in early Israel and in later Europe were very different and any account of the development of European family and marriage has to begin by recognising this fact (Goody 1983). In this chapter I want to trace out the situation in ancient Israel with regard to marital transactions, the devolution of property to women and close marriage, linking this with certain aspects of the domestic domain that we have examined in previous chapters.