[Avodah] Would Ruth's conversion be rejected today?

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 11:27:00AM -0400, Zev Sero wrote:
>>>  Then why would it matter whether the marriage was valid?  There could
>>>  just as easily be the same idea about giving the deceased's mistress
>>>  a child in his name...
>
>> Except that's not the societal norm. As far as we can tell.
...

> How do you know what the societal norm was?...

Because, as I continued:
>> Why turn this into a question instead of a data point?
>
> Because there is no data point.  You're begging the question.

WADR, you are. You assume that the story violates the norm, and ask why.
Why not assume that the one example we have details of conforms to the
norm, and obviate the question?

You remind me of the time a grade school rebbe asked us: How could
Re'uvein shlep Yaaqov's bed out of Rachel's tent, since he only had one
leg and needed one hand for his crutch?

And after we all went nuts trying to answer, he explained: Who said
Re'uvein only had one leg?

> I'm saying there's no reason to suppose this had anything to do with
> some hypothetical and long-extinct social idea of quasi-yibum...

It's not hypothetical, since we have Tamar and the people in Rus
performing a non-halachic quasi-yibum. In his book Ancient Israel,
Roland de Vaux writes (vol I: "Its Life and Institutions", pg 19) that
Hittites, Hurrites and Ugarits practiced it. And that Hammurabbi doesn't
mention it. Going beyond the locale, the early Indo-Europeans, Indians,
Persians, Greeks and Romans had such a concept as well. So it wasn't
"long extinct" among non-Jews until after the amoraim.

...
>> Yehudah didn't know it was Tamar, which kind of rules out his planning
>> to perpetuate Er or Onan's lines.

> Yehudah cared about it when he encouraged Onan to marry Tamar.  But
> there's no indication that Tamar cared about it at all.  What she
> cared about was becoming part of Yaacov's family.

Do you know he encouraged Onan? Do you know what Tamar was thinking?
We know Chazal say Tamar considered it an honor to stay in Yaaqov's
family. We do not know that she didn't also have other motivations. OTOH,
we know Yehudah had no noble intentions when accidentally conducting his
quasi-yibum, which was the instance under discussion, not the actual yibum
(?) to Onan.

BTW, does anyone know if real yibum requires lishmah, the way qiddushin
via bi'ah would?

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Nearly all men can stand adversity,
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