Emotions are the product of actions or of ideas about actions.
Inasmuch as Hebrew actions toward women and ideas about them were so
radically different from ours it logically follows that they cannot
have known the emotions of love as we know them. The only symptom of
love referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures is Amnon's getting lean from
day to day and feigning sickness (II. Sam. 13: 1-22); and the story
shows what kind of love that was. It would be contrary to all reason
and psychological consistency to suppose that modern tenderness of
romantic feeling toward women could have existed among a people whose
greatest and wisest man could, for any reason whatever, chide a
returning victorious army, as Moses did (Numbers 31: 9-19), for saving
all the women alive, and could issue this command:
"Now, therefore, kill every male among the living ones,
and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with
him. But all the women children that have not known man
by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."
The Arabs were the first Asiatics who spared women in war; the Hebrews
had not risen to that chivalrous stage of civilization. Joshua (8:26)
destroyed Ai and slew 12,000, "both of men and women:" and in Judges
(21:10-12) we read how the congregation sent an army of 12,000 men and
commanded them, saying,
"Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the
edge of the sword, with the women and the little ones.
And this is the thing ye shall do; ye shall utterly
destroy every male and every woman that hath lain by
man."
And they did so, sparing only the four hundred virgins. These were
given to the tribe of Benjamin, "that a tribe be not blotted out from
Israel;" and when it was found that more were needed they lay in wait
in the vineyards, and when the daughters of Shiloh came out to dance,
they caught them and carried them off as their wives; whence we see
that these Hebrews had not advanced beyond the low stage of evolution,
when wives are secured by capture or killed after battle. Among such
seek not for romantic love.