328 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and if women were carried off by force from neighboring tribes 

 and then married, there could be no certainty that the child borne 

 by a captive woman was the offspring of one of the men in whose 

 keeping she happened to be at the time of its birth. Fathers be- 

 ing thus uncertain, if not absolutely unknown, the paternal tie 

 could not be taken into account. Blood-relationship would be 

 traced through the mother, and this system would, through cus- 

 tom, prevail long after the conditions which gave rise to it had 

 come to an end. Independently, then, of any evidence that may 

 be forthcoming, we should conclude that the Israelites must at 

 one time have had a system of kinship through mothers. 



We now come to another point. There is no known case of a 

 nation having marriage by capture and marriage with the form 

 of capture without being exogamous ; and since the Israelites had 

 both these customs we infer that, unless they were altogether 

 exceptional, they were also exogamous — that is, they prohibited 

 marriage between those who were recognized as being related by 

 blood. When we examine in detail all the marriages mentioned 

 in which it is possible to trace the pedigrees both of husband and 

 wife, we find that there is not one that would violate the principle 

 of exogamy if descent were in the female line, while there are a 

 great number which could riot possibly occur if the Israelites were 

 exogamous and traced descent in the male line. For instance, 

 Nahor, Abraham's brother, married the daughter of his brother 

 Haran (Genesis, xi, 29) — his niece, if descent were in the male 

 line, but no relation if in the female. Abraham married his 

 father's daughter (Genesis, xx, 12) — his half-sister if kinship was 

 traced through males, but if through females, no relation. Mar- 

 riages of this kind, it may be mentioned, are peculiar to the system 

 of female descents and could not occur under any other system of 

 kinship, if marriages between blood-relations were forbidden. 

 We see in this case, too, what a point Abraham made of explain- 

 ing that his wife was not the daughter of his mother, but only 

 of his father. Isaac married Rebekah, granddaughter of his 

 paternal uncle Nahor, who had himself married his brother's 

 daughter (Genesis, xxiv, 15). Isaac and Rebekah would not be 

 blood-relations if descent were in the female line. Esau married 

 the daughter of Ishmael, his uncle on the father's side (Genesis, 

 xxviii, 9 ; xxxvi, 3). Jacob married the daughters of his maternal 

 uncle, Laban (Genesis, xxix, 10, 16). With descent in the female 

 line Laban would be Jacob's blood-relation, but his daughters 

 would not, since they would be of the kin of their mother. Laban 

 and Jacob were both great-grandsons of Terah, and the following 

 " tree " will show to what an extent, if kinship was reckoned in 

 the male line, the descendants of Terah knowingly intermarried 

 in the same blood. 



