The Hebrews seem to have been alone among the Semites in adopting monogamy, at least in general practice. Moreover, the Bible tells us that concubinage was not forbidden to God’s chosen people. In speaking of the daughter sold by her father to a rich man, the book of Exodus used language sufficiently explicit on this point--“If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power. And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. But if he take to him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.”[560] The book of Genesis indeed tells us that “a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh;”[561] but this famous verse seems to indicate the violence of the love rather than monogamic and indissoluble marriage. Doubtless the subjection of the Jewish woman was not extreme, as it is in Kabyle; it was, however, very great. Her consent to marriage was necessary, it is true, when she had reached majority, but she was all the same sold to her husband. We must note, nevertheless, that she had a recognised right of ownership, and that the property of the husband was security for that of the wife and for her dowry; but the husband none the less held the wife in strict dependence. The song of the virtuous woman at the end of Proverbs is generally quoted as a sublime portrait of the Jewish wife by all those who are still hypnotised by the prestige of the so-called holy books. However, in reading these celebrated verses with an unprejudiced mind, we hardly find more than the portrait of a laborious servant, busy and grasping--“She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.... She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.... Her candle goeth not out by night.... She eateth not the bread of idleness.” We shall see later that the wife, though she might gain much money, which seems to have been the ideal of the Hebrew husband according to the Proverbs, was repudiable at will, with no other reason than the caprice of the master who had bought her. Finally, and this is much more severe, she was always obliged to be able to prove, cloths in hand, that she was a virgin at the moment of her marriage, and this under pain of being stoned. Let us listen to the sacred book--“If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her ...” and seeking a pretext to repudiate her, he imputes to her a shameful crime, saying, “I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid ... her father and mother shall take her and shall represent to the elders of the city