These examples suffice to prove that among many savage races breaches of the marriage laws are thought to blast the fruits of the earth through excessive rain or excessive drought. Similar notions of the disastrous effects of sexual crimes may [Sidenote: Similar notions of the blighting effect of sexual crime may be detected among the civilised races of antiquity, for example, among the Jews.] be detected among some of the civilised races of antiquity, who seem not to have limited the supposed sterilising influence of such offences to the fruits of the earth, but to have extended it also to women and cattle.[399] Thus among the Hebrews we read how Job, passionately protesting his innocence before God, declares that he is no adulterer; “For that,” says he, “were an heinous crime; yea, it were an iniquity to be punished by the judges: for it is a fire that consumeth unto Destruction, and would root out all mine increase.”[400] In this passage the Hebrew word translated “increase” commonly means “the produce of the earth;”[401] and if we give the word its usual sense here, then Job affirms adultery to be destructive of the fruits of the ground, which is just what many savages still believe. This interpretation of his words is strongly confirmed by two narratives in Genesis, where we read how Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was taken into his harem by a king who did not know her to be the wife of the patriarch, and how thereafter God visited the king and his household with great plagues, especially by closing up the wombs of the king’s wives and his maid-servants, so that they bore no children. It was not till the king had discovered and confessed his sin, and Abraham had prayed God to forgive him, that the king’s women again became fruitful.[402] These narratives seem to imply that adultery, even when it is committed in ignorance, is a cause of plague and especially of sterility among women. Again, in Leviticus, after a long list of sexual crimes, we read:[403] “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you: and the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomiteth out her inhabitants.” This passage appears to imply that the land itself was somehow physically tainted by sexual transgressions so that it could no longer support the inhabitants.