this punishment, and the appropriate penalty would have been annexed, as in all the preceding verses.
Besides, the desire of procreating children is no incentive to defile the bed of a brother. The adulterer is prompted to his crime merely by his unbridled lusts, which he seeks to gratify. The threatening of being childless was no appropriate punishment of such a crime.
But to deter from marrying a brother's wife, when repudiated by him, or after his death, it was appropriate. The Jews had a great desire for children; and a threatening that they should be childless, if they violated the law by contracting marriage, was likely to deter from this sin.
The Jews, in the time of Henry VIII., regarded the Levitical prohibitions as having respect to marriage. "Many of the Jewish Rabbins," says Burnet, "did give it under their hand in Hebrew, That the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were thus to be reconciled: That the law of marrying a brother's wife, when he died without children, did only bind in the land of Judea, to preserve families, and maintain their successions in the land, as it had been
