BARRENNESS is, in the East, the hardest lot that can befall a woman, and was considered among the Israelites as the heaviest punishment with which the Lord could visit a female (Gen. xvi. 2 ; xxx. 1-23 ; Sam. i. 6, 29 ; Is. xlvii. 9; xlix. 21 ; Luke i. 25 ; Niebuhr, p. 76 ; Volney, ii. 359). According to the Talmud ( Yemmoth, vi. 6) a man was bound, after ten years' childless conjugal life, to marry another woman (with or without repudiation of the first), and even a third one, if the second proved also barren. Nor is it improbable that Moses himself contributed to strengthen the opinion of I disgrace by the promises of the Lord of exemption from barrenness as a blessing (Exod. xxiii. 26 ; Deut. vii. 14). Instances of childless wives are found in Gen. xi. 3o ; xxv. 21 ; xxix. 31; Judg. xiii. 2, 3 ; Luke i. 7, 36. Some cases of unlawful marriages, and more especially with a brother's wife, were visited with the punishment of barrenness (Lev. xx. 2o, 21); Michaelis, however (Masai:it-hes
Recht, v. 290), takes the word Dn'ely here in a figurative sense, implying that the children born in such an illicit marriage should not be ascribed to the real father, but to the former brother, thus depriv ing the second husband of the share of patrimonial inheritance which would otherwise have fallen to his lot if the first brother had died childless.
This general notion of the disgrace of barrenness in a woman may early have given rise, in the patri archal age, to the custom among barren wives of introducing to their husbands their maid-servants, and of regarding the children born in that concu binage as their own, by which they thought to cover their own disgrace of barrenness (Gen. xvi. 2 ; xxx. 3). [CHILDREN. ]-E. M.