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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: grammatical gender
In-Reply-To: mazzoldi@iol.ie's message of Sat, 27 May 1995 09:21:45 GMT
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In article <3q6r4v$uu8@barnacle.iol.ie> mazzoldi@iol.ie (Anna Mazzoldi) writes:

>(Note: I hope I don't come across as a raving feminist. I may be a feminist,
>but I don't rave very often.... In this case, the joke about patriarchy was
>mostly a joke... At least from the point of view of grammar, I suspect
>strongly that in the very same way, had things happened differently, dead
>Abraham's body may well have been defined as "belonging to Sarah" when it came
>to who was to pay for the burial ground...)

I suspect you're right about this:  The expression is to be understood as "the
body that X is stuck with" where depending on circumstance X was "Abraham" or
"Sarah."  Although it's at least as likely, unless the children were minors,
that the eldest son would be considered the one stuck with dealing with the old
fellow's body.

>(Other note: On the other hand, I'm not sure women could hold property in
>their own right in Jewish society, and therefore pay for the land... After
>all, levirate was invented so that a widow would not have to be left to her
>own resources...)

Unrelated issues.  Whether women could own property or not (and I believe that
they could, but will defer to any Talmidim on the question), the levirate was
only invoked *if the husband died without issue*:  The first (first male?)
child of a levirate marriage was considered to be the heir, for purposes of
continuing the line, of the dead man.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
