Recent critics have seen in this story merely a popular legend intended to account for the fact that marriage by capture was practised among the Benjamites. We might just as well assert that the story of Gunpowder Plot is a legend which has grown out of the customs of the 5th of November. The critics have not even the justification that marriage by capture was common among the Israelites. In fact, this is the only instance of it which we meet with in the Old Testament history of Israel—an instance so exceptional as to be inexplicable unless it had originated under special circumstances. It was certainly not the survival of an earlier custom common to the rest of the tribes, nor is there any trace of its having been general in the tribe of Benjamin itself. In fact, we look in vain for any other example of it alike among Israelites and Canaanites, or even among the Benjamites in any other period of their history. It is true, however, that the account of the war between Benjamin and its brother tribes has passed through the magnifying lenses of later history. The exaggerated numbers of the combatants and the slain, like the use of the universal ‘all’ and ‘every’ where the partial ‘some’ is intended, are in thorough accordance with Oriental habits of expression. The modern resident in the East is only too familiar with such exaggerations of language, and in studying Oriental history due allowance must always be made for them. In the account of the war, moreover, its real character has been somewhat obscured. Benjamin has been regarded too much as a separate entity, distinct and cut off from the rest of Israel, rather than as the tribe which had once gathered round the sanctuary of Beth-On, and which continued to form the ‘southern’ frontier of the house of Joseph. The war against Benjamin, in fact, was like the war against Jabesh-Gilead—a quarrel not with a tribe, but with certain Israelitish cities. It is even possible that in this quarrel Jabesh-Gilead was from the beginning associated with Gibeah and the other cities of Benjamin. At all events, we find it so allied in the age of Saul. Saul’s first act as king was to rescue Jabesh-Gilead from the Ammonites, and it was the men of Jabesh-Gilead who took down the bodies of Saul and Jonathan from the walls of Beth-Shan and gave them honourable burial.[282]