What happened to biblical law when transferred into late antique Christianity? How can answering this question provide a paradigm that helps us understand the rise and development of late antique Christian legal traditions? In the first centuries of the Common Era, the Christian legal tradition began to evolve in Roman, Greek, rabbinic, and biblical contexts. Focusing on the biblical institution of levirate marriage, this article offers a paradigm that elucidates how Christians might have adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected their legal heritage; it may illuminate the overall development of Christian legal discourse. Following a short survey of the rabbinic adaptation of biblical levirate marriage and the Roman and Christian rulings regarding this practice, I analyze the Christian exegetical and theological discourse on levirate marriage, focusing on the acceptance or rejection of levirate marriage as a whole and adaptations to the biblical institution. This analysis demonstrates the disparity between the rabbinic discourse, the Christian and Roman rulings, and the theological and exegetical discourse. It shows how Christians remodeled their biblical heritage according to Greek and Roman legal concepts, namely the Roman adoption and the Greek epiklerate, and treated it as part of inheritance law and child-parent relationships, whereas the rabbis used different adaptations and treated it as part of matrimonial law and sexual relationships. This discussion therefore recontextualizes the legal discourse, positioning the Christian approach to levirate marriage as a complex case of legal transplant and adaptation of a legal heritage.

This article presents the legal outlooks of two fundamental religious judicial systems—the halakha of Judaism and the shari'a of Islam—on the effect of war on private ownership. Specifically, we address the situation in which the conquered inhabitants are Jews or Muslims and halakha or shari'a are the legal systems of their religions, respectively, but the conqueror is a nonbeliever or secular sovereign. Such situations evoke the following questions: To what extent the transfer of ownership by the conquering sovereign is recognized by the religious laws of the conquered population? May a member of the conquered religion acquire property that was seized by the nonbeliever sovereign from a member of the conquered religion? Is transfer of ownership by virtue of conquest permanent or reversible, so once the conquest ends, ownership reverts to the pre-conquest owner? Various approaches to those questions within each of two religious legal systems are presented. Some of the similarities and the differences between halakha and shari'a are pointed out.