According to Deuteronomy, if a married man dies childless, his brother is obligated to marry the widow—in a union otherwise forbidden. This practice, known as levirate marriage, is the subject of the talmudic tractate Yevamot. (Deuteronomy also prescribes a ritual that can relieve the brother of the obligation.)

Skip forward to 16th-century England. Anxious to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, previously married to his brother, so that he could marry Ann Boleyn, Henry VIII sought help in an appeal to the finer points of talmudic law. To this end, he ordered a copy of the Bomberg Talmud, the first-ever printed edition, hoping scholars could find an applicable loophole. That was his mistake, as Jeremy Brown writes:

Henry argued that his marriage to Catherine should be dissolved since it was biblically forbidden for a man to marry his sister-in-law. But as we [learn] from tractate Yevamot, the Bible commands a man to marry his widowed sister-in-law if his brother died without children. Since [his brother] Arthur died childless, it could be argued that Henry was now fulfilling the biblical requirement of levirate marriage. . . . If that was the case, the marriage was kosher and could not be dissolved. . . .

[I]t’s a little bit more complicated than that. Behind the scenes were Christian scholars who struggled to reconcile the injunction against a man marrying his sister-in-law, found in one part of the Bible, with the command to do so under specific circumstances, found in another. In fact, the legality of Henry’s marriage [to Catherine] had been in doubt for many years, which is why Henry had obtained the Pope’s special permission to marry.

The bishop of London eventually concocted an argument for nullifying the marriage to Catherine that involved not an appeal to the Talmud but a rejection of papal authority, setting into motion the English Reformation. And now skip forward to the 1950s, when a copy of the Bomberg Talmud was discovered in Westminster Abbey; whether it was the one ordered by Henry VIII remains a subject of debate.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.