Monday, February 21, 2011

Numbers 36

Numbers 36:8
Every daughter who comes into possession of an inheritance of any tribe of the sons of Israel shall be wife to one of the family of the tribe of her father, so that the sons of Israel each may possess the inheritance of his fathers.
Again, the rules of special inheritance crop up for clarification.  The rule set down here, that women who inherit must marry within their tribe, does make logistical sense.  I can picture the situation a few generations in if this were not set up.  There would probably have been enough women inheriting from their fathers and then marrying outside their tribe to have really fuzzed up the tribal boundaries.

However, I can think of many people who would consider this rule oppressive, being forced to marry from inside your tribe.  But that's not how the people of the time normally thought.  Clan structures were very intricate at the time, and marriages were often arranged.  So a woman marrying a distant (or occasionally not-so-distant) cousin wasn't unheard of.  Whatever it might have done for the bloodline as we look at it in modern genetics, it did keep the family strong.  Also, given contemporary travel methods (foot or animal), keeping the family close together was almost a necessity.  So I personally have no disagreement with how this command worked out.

No comments:

Post a Comment