A PRIEST MAY NOT come in contact with a corpse except when the deceased is a close relative (21:1–3). The list of relatives does not mention the wife.
How do we account for the text’s silence concerning the wife? The Torah gives two examples of a husband’s burying a wife: Abraham buries Sarah (Genesis 23), and Jacob buries Rachel (Genesis 35). But these cases do not pertain to priests and thus do not shed light on this law.
One could claim that the wife’s absence from the list of relatives reflects her more marginal status. As Katarzyna Grosz observes after studying documents from the 14th century B. C.E., “women do not become members of their husband’s lineage—only their children do.…[The women] could be termed as a ‘foreign element’ in their husbands’ families” (“Some Aspects of the Position of Women in Nuzi,” in Women’s Earliest Records, ed. B. S. Lesko, 1989, p. 178).
Yet one could also argue the reverse: no mention is made because none is necessary—because the wife is included ipso facto. Three lines of evidence support this interpretation. First is the idea that Leviticus 20:11 expresses about a unity between husband and wife. According to this verse, the nakedness of the mother is equivalent to that of the father, implying that the two are as one. Second, Genesis 2:24 expresses the unity of the couple by stating that the two become one flesh. Third, the Torah in several places includes a wife without mentioning her (see at Leviticus 10:14); in other words, the writer expects readers to keep wives in mind.
While both interpretations remain plausible in parashat Emor, neither can be confirmed.
If a priest may not bury his wife, who then buries her? The law in parashat Emor permits the priest to bury his mother, and thus a priest’s wife can definitely be buried by her son. If there is no son, then the female members of the household, or members of her family of origin (if they are not priests) can still come in contact with her corpse and bury her.
—Tamara Cohn Eskenazi