The tendency in Israel continued to restrict marriage to one's own tribe. The law of inheritance gave force to this custom. Those very near of kin were thus regarded as most eligible for wedlock. Jacob married two of his first cousins. A similar situation is seen in the marriage of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca. Each husband, under specially trying circumstances, had claimed that his wife was his "sister," and so she was,--for in the patriarchal form of society all who belonged to the same family or clan were brother and sister,--but not in the strict sense which the word was intended to convey. While brothers and sisters of the whole blood might not marry, yet it would not have been regarded as altogether out of place for half-brothers and sisters to marry, especially if they had a different mother. The story of Amnon and Tamar not only throws light upon this point, but illustrates how brother and sister by the same father as well as the same mother stood in a greatly different relation, the one to the other, in the matter of brotherly protection from that of half-brother and half-sister. Amnon, son of David, fell desperately in love with his half-sister, David's daughter, Tamar. By a cunningly devised plot Amnon succeeded in bringing the beautiful damsel into his chamber. When Absalom, Tamar's brother and half-brother to Amnon, heard that his sister had thus been dealt with, he felt himself under obligation to defend her honor, by slaying his half-brother, which he did at a feast given during the season of sheep shearing, when the king's sons were all making merry. The remark of Frances Power Cobbe is as true in Israel as elsewhere. "A man may build a castle or a palace, but poor creature! be he as wise as Solomon or as rich as Croesus, he cannot turn it into a home. No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman, and only a woman,--a woman all by herself if she must, or prefers, without any man to help her,--who can turn a house into a home." It was the Hebrew wife and mother who largely gave to the homes of the Israelites their peculiar quality. But it may be said it was seldom her necessity or her preference to set up a home without the presence of some son of Israel.