The three R's of Hebrew love thus show how these people arranged their
marriages with reference to social and religious customs or
utilitarian considerations, buying their wives by service or
otherwise, without any thought of sentimental preferences and
sympathies, such as underlie modern Christian marriages of the higher
order. It might be argued that the ingredients of romantic love
existed, but simply are not dwelt on in the old Hebrew stories. But it
is impossible to believe that the Bible, that truly inspired and
wonderfully realistic transcript of life, which records the minutest
details, should have neglected in its thirty-nine books, making over
seven hundred pages of fine print, to describe at least one case of
sentimental infatuation, romantic adoration, and self-sacrificing
devotion in pre-matrimonial love, had such love existed. Why should it
have neglected to describe the manifestations of sentimental love,
since it dwells so often on the symptoms and results of sensual
passion? Stories of lust abound in the Hebrew Scriptures; Genesis
alone has five. The Lord repented that he had made man on earth and
destroyed even his chosen people, all but Noah, because every
imagination in the thoughts of man's heart "was only evil
continually." But the flood did not cure the evil, nor did the
destruction of Sodom, as a warning example. It is after those events
that the stories are related of Lot's incestuous daughters, the
seduction of Dinah, the crime of Judah and Tamar, the lust of
Potiphar's wife, of David and Bath-sheba, of Amnon and Tamar, of
Absalom on the roof, with many other references to such crimes.[288]