E.g. Deuteronomy 25:5-10 clearly describes levirate marriage as an obligation. How does unplanned exploration of cultural variation get from there to declaring levirate marriage a sin, while still treating the bible as the word of God?
Why is this more of a problem for unplanned exploration than for purposeful change?
It seems like there should be a significant reputation cost to the reversal, since it needed to be widely understood.
I’d expect arbitary exploration to be averse to conspicuous costs. Whereas planned strategies can be plausibly motivated by a vision of inheriting valuable land from widows who have less pressure to leave the land to kin in their wills.
Hmm, I would have assumed that gentile Christians just never followed the practice (just like they didn’t keep kosher or follow other Old Testament laws), and (fairly naturally) saw it as conflicting with monogamy.
Am I mistaken—was levirate marriage actually ever widely practiced in the Western Christian church?
I don’t have any evidence directly answering that, but levirate marriage seems to have been encouraged among a wide variety of pre-industrial cultures.
Why is this more of a problem for unplanned exploration than for purposeful change?
It seems like there should be a significant reputation cost to the reversal, since it needed to be widely understood.
I’d expect arbitary exploration to be averse to conspicuous costs. Whereas planned strategies can be plausibly motivated by a vision of inheriting valuable land from widows who have less pressure to leave the land to kin in their wills.
Hmm, I would have assumed that gentile Christians just never followed the practice (just like they didn’t keep kosher or follow other Old Testament laws), and (fairly naturally) saw it as conflicting with monogamy.
Am I mistaken—was levirate marriage actually ever widely practiced in the Western Christian church?
I don’t have any evidence directly answering that, but levirate marriage seems to have been encouraged among a wide variety of pre-industrial cultures.