Women on the Losing Side

No one wants to be on the losing side, especially during the days of the Biblical narrative. To be the losing side meant that your entire nation/city/group/family/ or kingdom would be destroyed and . The battles between the Canaanite clans were brutal and a fight to the death of the losing side, or at least death to all the MEN on the losing side. If you possessed a "Y" chromosome, chances were the winning side was not going to allow you to continue to live so that you could one day fight them again. Not necessarily ethnic cleansing, but insurance for squelching future battles that could arise from the male survivors.

The women of the losing side, however, often did not face the same fate as their men. Commentaries discuss that during the days of the Biblical narrative, child bearing age women were in short supply due to the physically and potentially deadly act of child birth. A community or group could only grow as strong as their women were able to have more children to support the community. If there was a shortage of women, then there would be a shortage of children, which would mean a shortage of workers and future leaders of the group. Therefore, if there was a shortage of women within the group, the men would have to go outside the group to find potential wives and concubines.

A manner to "get" more women into the tribe would be to collect the "booty" or women from the losing side of the battle. Although different accounts in the narrative stipulate what women were allowable into the community (some accounts no women were allowed and other accounts all women were allowed), if the importance of getting more women in to the community to provide more more children, then it make sense that the winners would want to ensure that the children were products of THEIR community and not the losing community.

I can understand the benefits behind bringing more women into the group in order for more children to be born. However, I do think such a plan could have backfired on the Israelites. Just because an individual is a woman, does not necessarily entail that she will not seek revenge on the individuals who killed her people and captured her. A mother can be a powerful influence on the development of her children, and if she is not able to accomplish revenge, she will get her children to do it. I can imagine a bitter and revenge filled woman passing on such thoughts and ideas to her children, and thus her male children could now become an equal threat as the adult males whom initially lost the battle.

While I'm not trying to read story lines into the Bible, it seems like by bringing any individuals from the losing side into the winning side could have had disastrous consequences. Even Moses rebelled against the household that had raised him, and I wonder how much of his up bringing did he use against the house of Pharaoh when he was arguing with Pharaoh. This practice seems to be ripe for an epic Greek story.