The Law, the Sandal, and the Stories Around It

The law in Deuteronomy is brief and covers both outcomes. If brothers live together and one dies without a son, the widow is not to marry outside the family; the surviving brother takes her, and the first son she bears carries the dead man name so that it is not blotted out. If he will not, she brings him before the elders at the gate, and when he says in their hearing that he does not wish to take her, she removes his sandal, spits before him, and declares what is done to the man who will not build his brother house. The refusal is permitted and it is public and it is meant to be uncomfortable.

The clearest narrative in the same key is Genesis 38, where Judah gives Tamar to his second son Onan after the death of the first, and Onan avoids fathering a child who would not count as his own. The chapter treats the avoidance as the offence, which is what the passage is actually about. Ruth turns on a related but distinct institution, the redemption of a kinsman land and household, and the sandal appears there too in a transaction rather than a rebuke.

The law was still assumed to be in force in the first century, since the question the Sadducees put to Jesus, about a woman married in turn to seven brothers, works only if his hearers take the obligation for granted.