Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/208

 a recognised right of ownership, and that the property of the husband was security for that of the wife and for her dowry; but the husband none the less held the wife in strict dependence. The song of the virtuous woman at the end of Proverbs is generally quoted as a sublime portrait of the Jewish wife by all those who are still hypnotised by the prestige of the so-called holy books. However, in reading these celebrated verses with an unprejudiced mind, we hardly find more than the portrait of a laborious servant, busy and grasping—"She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms Her candle goeth not out by night She eateth not the bread of idleness." We shall see later that the wife, though she might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the Hebrew husband according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her. Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be able to prove, cloths in hand, that she was a virgin at the moment of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned. Let us listen to the sacred book—"If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her " and seeking a pretext to repudiate her, he imputes to her a shameful crime, saying, "I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid her father and mother shall take her and shall represent to the elders of the city in the gate the tokens of the damsel's virginity." Of what kind were these proofs? The following verses tell us, "They shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him, and they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel, then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die; because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore