Secondly, the widow herself was encouraged to come back to the “world of living” and to remarry, in the subsequent verse. To sum up, the entire hymn becomes incongruent if we forcibly insert widow immolation in the place where the married wives approached the widow. A similar “return to life” is granted the dead man’s bow in verse 9, where someone, quite possibly the dead man’s son, repossesses the bow to put it to future use.” The happy women in verse 7 apparently approach the funeral pyre to adorn the widow for her return to life. From verse 8 it appears that the widow lies down, temporarily, beside her dead husband, but is summoned back to life and indeed symbolically reborn to become the wife of a new husband (quite possibly her brother-in-law, in levirate marriage). “The next three verses (7–9) have been much discussed, especially in the context of “suttee” (satī) or widow-burning, though the verses are emphatically not a depiction thereof.
Brereton have clarified that the instance of Sati was absent from the hymn :
In their prelude to the hymn, Stephanie W. It provides us a crystal clear instance of widow remarriage! Probably, it is the brother of the husband who marries the widow. Source : The Rig Veda :The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, translated by Stephanie W. You have come into existence now as wife of a husband who has grasped your hand and wishes to have you.”“ “Arise, woman, to the world of the living. In the Rig Veda 10.18, the hymn is basically about a dead man’s funeral. However, the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda have hymns on death, which are sometimes brought up to show that widow immolation was a vogue during the Vedic era. We don’t succeed in getting a glimpse of widow immolation or Sati in the Vedas. Perhaps, this recorded incident is much later than the Vedic age. This is the information that we we mainly obtain from the Greek writers who had recorded the fact in writing, at that time. It is said that both of the wives were extremely anxious to immolate themselves, and ultimately, since the elder queen was with her child, the younger wife was permitted to immolate herself. However, the first ever recorded and eye-witness account of Sati is somewhere during 316 BCE, when one of the two wives of Keteus, a general, had immolated herself after Keteus had died fighting against Antigonos. Roughly, the Vedic age (Early and Later) had the timeline of 1500 BCE-500 BCE in the subcontinent.
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