Deuteronomy 25:8, commentary and pictures

Deuteronomy 25:8 stands in the fifth and last book of the Pentateuch, in the second of three addresses given by Moses just before his death. Chapters 5 to 26, including this verse, review the law for the new generation, and this repetition gives the book its name Deuteronomy, meaning the second law or a duplicate of the law. The verse belongs to the repetition of various laws in Deuteronomy 23-26 dealing with duties between man and man and between man and God.

The verse is part of the law of levirate marriages for the Goel, the nearest kinsman. The law requires that when a man dies childless without a son or heir, whether by murder or otherwise, his brother or nearest kinsman take the widow and raise up seed counted as the dead man's son and heir. Its purpose is to perpetuate the family and preserve the dead man's name so that no family should perish in Israel. Its purpose is to redeem the inheritance and keep a man's inheritance and homestead in the land of Canaan from passing out of his family into other hands, the right to redeem belonging to the nearest kinsman.

The law did not originate with Moses but was already recognized in patriarchal times in germ and in special form, and afterward became part of the Mosaic code. Its earlier existence before Moses is proved by what happened in Genesis 38. The verse describes the procedure when he is asked to redeem: the elders of his city shall call him and speak to him, and if he stands to his refusal and declares he does not want to take her, he persists before them. The man who stands to his refusal is publicly insulted and exposed to the utmost contempt through legal tokens, branded as the man that will not build up his brother's house, and his name becomes a reproach.

Refusal brings not only human contempt but the displeasure of the Lord, as shown in the death penalty in the case in Genesis 38. The first son of such a marriage is counted as the deceased man's son and inherits his land, while later sons belong to the Goel himself, so if only one son is born the Goel is left reckoned childless without an heir for his own name. That inheritance rule explains why the kinsman in Ruth 4 refused lest he mar his own inheritance, and this law provides the background for Boaz's claim that a closer relative had the first right to redeem Naomi's family. The same law makes Tamar's strategy an effort to secure rights guaranteed to her by law of which Judah had deprived her, with her sons reckoned legitimate and one in the ancestry of Christ.

The verse belongs to the Mosaic law behind the Sadducees' question about the resurrection concerning a woman who successively married seven brothers, asking which brother would be her husband in the resurrection. This arrangement for keeping the homestead and inheritance in the family will be unnecessary for those accounted worthy to obtain the resurrection from the dead, because they cannot die anymore, so each man's portion in the new earth will remain unimpaired throughout eternity.