'They did not give us Taites their daughters in marriage: but we wooed them against their will with our swords.
'And with us captivity brought no abasement to them: and they neither toiled in making bread nor boiled the pot.
'But we commingled them with our noblest women: and they bare us fair sons white of face [_i. e._, of pure descent].
'How often shalt thou see among us the son of a captive bride: who staunchly thrusts through heroes when he meets them in the fight!'"[496]
[496] ROBERTSON SMITH, _Kinship and Marriage_, 72-74; _cf._ LETOURNEAU, _op. cit._, 115, 116; KOHLER, "Das vorislamitische Recht der Araber," _ZVR._, VIII, 240, 241, 247.
But nothing can exceed the brutal ferocity with which sometimes the people of Israel supplied themselves with women. The Hebrew Bible contains various striking illustrations of the practice. Contrary to law, which forbade intermarriage with the gentiles, members of the military class were allowed to marry foreign women taken in war.[497] On one occasion the tribe of Benjamin, or rather the remnant of it which had escaped the sword of Israel, stood in sore need of wives; but their brethren had sworn not to give them their daughters in marriage, nor could they legally marry gentile women. "The difficulty of procuring wives for Benjamin--which Israel made its _own_ difficulty--was solved by the wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants of Jabez-Gilead, whose population yielded 400 virgins; and next by the men of Benjamin enacting a rape of the Sabines for themselves, each man seizing and carrying off one of the daughters of Shiloh to be his wife, on an occasion when the women met for a festival in certain vineyards near Bethel."[498] In this case the spoils of treachery and war were Jewish women. At another time the alien Midianites were conquered; and at the command of Moses the women and even the male infants which the soldiers had spared were deliberately slaughtered. The virgins alone, thirty-two thousand in number, were kept alive; and these were divided among the people precisely as was the other booty, even the priests, apparently, receiving a share.[499]
[497] Deut. 21: 10-14. _Cf._ MCLENNAN, _op. cit._, I, 43, 44, who calls attention to SELDEN'S treatise on the rules regulating such marriages: _De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum_, lib. v, cap. xiii, fol. 617.