Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/111

 vengeance, proportioned to the power and to the anger of the relations of the ravished woman.

We find similar customs among savage or barbarous peoples nearly everywhere. The Tartars, says Barnes, make their wives of the prisoners that they capture in battles.

The Code of Manu also mentions this primitive mode of union more or less conjugal:—"When a young girl is carried off by force from the parental house, weeping and crying for succour, and those who oppose this violence are killed or wounded, and a breach is made in the walls, this mode (of marriage) is called that of the giants."

The Bible relates several facts of the same kind. Thus the tribe of Benjamin procured themselves wives by massacring the inhabitants of Jabez-Gilead and capturing four hundred of their virgins. Another time the Benjamites practised a Sabine rape in carrying off the women during a feast near Bethel.

The Israelites, having vanquished the Midianites, killed all the men, according to the Semitic custom, and took away the cattle, the children, and the women. But Moses, always directly inspired by the Lord, ordered them to put to death the women and even the male children, and to keep the young girls and virgins. There were sixteen thousand maidens, of whom thirty-two were reserved for the Lord's share, which doubtless means for the priests. Of the sheep, oxen, asses, and maidens that remained, Moses further deducted the fiftieth part, which he gave to the Levites of the tabernacle.

This ferocity and this coarse assimilation of captured women to cattle are not peculiar to the people of God, but prevailed amongst the primitive Arabs, or rather amongst all the Semites, who were still savage or barbarous.

Capture in war has, besides, been largely practised by all races and throughout the world. An old Irish poem, the "Duan Eiranash," speaks of three hundred women carried