Looking Forward

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TIL The Family. Monogamy is in present times generally prevalent in the entire civilized world. The monogamian family gradually and slowly grew out of the Syndiasmian. It is based upon exclusive cohabitation between one man and one woman, theoretically for life. According to Morgan's hypothesis, it owes its existence to the wish of establishing paternity with certainty for purposes of inheritance. As I said before, I do not fully agree with this hypothesis, although the motive of establishing fath- ership with certainty may have been very powerful toward maintaining monogamy after its establishment and with the continued growth of property. From my studies, I conclude that there must have been a more direct economic reason for it, although it cannot be denied that there was, probably, always a close relationship between marriage and inheritance. So, for instance, we find in the Pentateuch (Numbers, ch. 36), that the members of the tribe of Joseph objected to the marriage of the daughters of Zelaphahad out of the tribe, because, as they said: Then shall the inheritance be taken from the inheritance of our fathers, and shall be put to the inheritance of the tribe, whereunto they are received; and that by the decision of the Lord, they were not allowed to marry out of the tribe. But we find that the objection was purely economic, and that there was not a bit of sentimentality about it. Those who objected did so in their own interest, not only in that of their progeny. At that time monogamy was not yet known, and land v:as held in common within the tribe. The common ownership of land secured to every member of the tribe at least a subsistence. With the establishment of private ownership in land, however, and especially after the tribal relation had ceased to be a-part of...

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.