philosophy or the rude barbarism, which authorized unnatural passion and polygamy, and permitted a community of wives'. These excesses also pro voked the just reprehension of the primitive writers. The same incestuous commerce with which the Persians were stigmatized, prevailed very generally in the East, and especially among the Magusæi, Medians, Galatians, Phrygians, and Egyptians. It is not improbable that the Phoenicians used some reserve in favour of the uterine sister, to which Abraham may have alluded when he called Sarah the daughter of his father, and which he may have intended to contrast with the common practice of the Egyptians, who married their sisters without any discrimination, even if they were born of the same father and mother, or the same father, or the same mother, or whether they were twins. The Canaanites were guilty of transgressing all the parts f Lactantius, Div. Inst. 1. iii. c. 22. Cf. 1. iv. c. 3. exposes Plato's doctrine of the community of wives. Cæsar, de Bell. Gall. 1. v. s. 14. has recorded the practice of the ancient Britons. In the Himala mountains there prevails a community of hus_ bands; and it is not unusual for four or five brothers to marry and possess the same woman at the same time. On the coast of Malabar a woman is not allowed to have more than twelve husbands in the neighbourhood of Calicut a woman is permitted by the laws to have several husbands: the practice is especially prevalent among the noble castes, and some of these ladies have had ten of these husbands at the same time. In the ancient Median empire also it was customary for women to entertain a number of husbands. See Monthly Review, vol. 95. p. 234. Among the Omawhaws, a North American tribe, numbers of the females are betrothed in infancy, and the individual who marries the eldest daughter espouses all the sisters as they come of age. Ibid. vol. 101. p. 347. of the law of the Noachidæ, especially the original prohibition of incestuous marriage; for in respect of marriage within the degrees prohibited by the Levitical law, no guilt could be incurred before the publication of that law. These offences of the Canaanites were called abominations and abominable customs, and as many other provisions of the Levitical law were principally or entirely remedial, and introduced for the counteraction of abuses which prevailed among the heathen, so the Levitical prohibitions were especially designed to obviate the abominations of marriage, which were usual at the time among the Canaanites and the Egyptians. The law was introduced with a manifest allusion to these practices: "Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the Lord your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan shall ye not do; neither shall ye walk in their ordinances." After prohibiting access generally to any who is near of kin, the divine Legislator proceeds to specify different persons, with whom there should be no intermarriage. Fifteen persons are expressly mentioned in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, besides the wife of another man whom the Israelites were forbidden to marry, of whom they were related to six by consanguinity, and nine by affinity'. Selden de Jure Nat. et Gen. 1. v. c. 11. Nata, soror, neptis, matertera, patris et uxor By Consanguinity. 1. Mother. By Affinity. 1. Father's wife. 2. Sister, whether the daugh- 2. Father's brother's wife. ter of father or mother, 3. Son's wife. or of both. 3. Son's daughter. 4. Daughter's daughter. 5. Father's sister. 6. Mother's sister. 4. Brother's wife. 5. Wife's son's daughter. 6. Wife's daughter's daugh ter. 7. Wife's sister. 8. Wife's mother. 9. Wife's daughter. To these are added, as it is said, by necessary inference, three other persons: viz. 1. daughter; 2. wife's father's mother; 3. wife's mother's mother. The daughter is added by inference; for if the daughter's daughter is interdicted, much more the daughter herself: and indeed the prohibition is expressed in the interdiction of commerce with a woman and her daughter. It is from this latter prohibition, by a less obvious inference, that the wife's grandmother on either side is interdicted. It will be observed, that in this table of prohibitions, the extreme points are, the grandmother on one side and the granddaughter on the other. The force of the prohibitions which are specified was reciprocal, and what is expressed of the one sex is implied of the other. Thus, if the son is for Uxorisque soror, privigni nata, nurusque Atque soror patris, conjungi lege vetantur. The neptis and the soror must be understood each of two relations, because the nata is added: Gerhard, s. 260. makes the number of persons sixteen, taking the sister twice as born ex utroque vel ex altero tantum parente. bidden to marry the mother, the mother is by the same rule forbidden to marry the son; and if a woman is forbidden to marry a son, a man is forbidden to marry a daughter. From the unity of the man and wife in marriage, it is held to be a general rule in cases of affinity, that a man is interdicted from marrying his wife's relations, as his own in the same degree. Philo held that the law was so severe, as to prohibit the son-in-law, even after his father's death, from marrying his mother-in-law; partly from the reverence which was due to the father, and partly from the maternal relation which had been held by the motherin-law nor did it allow a man to marry his daughter-in-law, whether in her widowhood or virginity, either during the life or after the decease of his wife, her mother. For the father-in-law, holding the paternal relation, was bound to respect his daughterin-law as his own daughter'. According to the exposition of Jewish commentators, the mother, step-mother, daughter-in-law, father's own brother's wife, and the brother's wife, except in a particular case, whether legitimately or illegitimately born, are interdicted: the aunt also and the wife's daughter are properly interdicted, if there is any relation by blood. The wife's relations might not be married during her life, or after her decease or divorce, with the only exception of the wife's sister, upon whom the restriction was limited to the life of the existing wife. In the interdiction upon the k * Fr. Hotman de Rit. Nupt. et Matr. c. 7. Gerhard, s. 261, 275. Fr. Hotman de Rit. Nupt. et Matr. c. 8. wife's relations, the law took no notice of any intercourse before the marriage; but the tradition of the elders supplied the deficiency, and pronounced it unlawful for a man to marry, during the woman's life, the relations of any woman with whom he had lived in adultery or prostitution, not so unlawful, however, as to vitiate the marriage, but only to render the offender worthy of corporal punishment: and the sentence was not unwisely designed, to cut off all temptation to a renewal of the intercourse, which after the marriage would be incestuous. It should be remembered, that the notion of incest among the Jews was confined to marriage, and that no incest would be imputed to any meretricious intercourse which a man might hold with two sisters, or even with a mother and a daughter, or even to a marriage with a woman whom his father had debauched. There was also no incest in marrying the mother or daughter of a father's wife; or a brother's son's wife; or a niece, whether born of a brother or a sister. The reasons assigned by the Jews for the prohibition of incestuous marriage, were, the danger arising in the familiar intercourse of domestic life, and the impropriety of uniting the branch with the rootTM. The Talmudists however were not content without an almost indefinite extension of the restrictions of the sacred law, and under the pretence of precluding the violations of that law, and under the name of secondary wives, they expressly interdicted the marriage of twenty other relations, and by consequence m Selden de Jure Nat. et Gent. 1. v. c. 10. |