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.

FOUR MORE BIBLE STORIES

Dr. Trumbull’s opinion has already been cited that there are certainly “gleams of romantic love from out of the clouds of degraded human passions in the ancient East,” in the stories of Shechem and Dinah, Samson and the damsel of Timnah, David and Abigail, Adonijah and Abishag.  But I fail to find even “gleams” of romantic love in these stories.  Shechem said he loved Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, but he humbled her and dealt with her “as with an harlot,” as her brothers said after they had slain him for his conduct toward her.  Concerning Samson and the Timnah girl we are simply told that he saw her and told his father, “Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well” (literally, “she is right in my eyes").  And this is evidence of romantic love!  As for Abigail, after her husband has refused