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 of the Jews as to marrying the deceased brother's wife, says that he may not marry her if she is his own wife's sister, and, moreover, that the prohibition holds good after the wife's death. It is possible that this latter part of the tradition may be akin to what our Lord called (S. Mark vii. 9) 'your own tradition,' and so may have tended to 'frustrate the commandment of God,' in Lev. xviii. 18, by perplexing the interpretation of the words, 'in her life-time."

I may add, however, as shewing my argument to be an independent witness to the same sense and application of Leviticus xviii. 18, that I had no knowledge of either of these statements when I sketched out the argument of the preceding letter.

I have said that I have no need to enter into the question of the "one hour" mentioned in the Mishna. And this is certainly, true, because the question which I have been considering is not whether, if a wife's sister be forbidden at all she is forbidden for ever by both being alive together at a certain time but simply whether the whole matter involved in the words "in her life-time" be not explained and accounted for by its being a prohibition, narrowing the requirements of the law of the Levirate, and nothing more. But it may be added that the statement of the Mishna as to the "one hour" is certainly rather confirmatory than not of the second sister being wholly forbidden, except under that law's provision in the case of the death of the one previous to the widowhood of the other, because if the being forbidden for one hour forbids for ever, the second sister, whether herself a virgin or the widow of a stranger, being (like the brother's widow left a widow in her sister's life-time) marriageable to any other man than her brother-in-law, during all the time of her sister's married life, (she, I say,) would be all that time forbidden to him. This would answer certainly to the one hour, and if so, under the Rule of the Mishna, she would be forbidden to him for ever, which brings us to the general prohibition under the general law.

Whether the above inference of the Mishna be a legitimate one from the words "in her life-time," that is, that the forbidding should depend for ever upon the state of things at the time of the brother's death (as Dr. M'Caul expresses it), I need not determine. Mr. Perry, in one of the extracts above, seems to think it might rather be one of the additions by which the Jews frustrated "the Word of God by their tradition," and possibly it was so. But at least we may say that there appears to be a weighty moral consideration to support the view of the prohibition extending from one hour to the future life. Because thus, in the case of a man finding his brother's wife a widow, being his own wife's sister, and perchance preferring her to his own wife, he might otherwise be tempted to get rid of his own wife,