This book explores the labyrinth of issues connected with, and emerging from, marriage by capture. The practice encompasses a spectrum of behaviours ranging from planned elopement and ceremonial or ritual capture to sudden, violent capture, and it even includes raiding for wives. The expression ‘marriage by capture’ is used not because it is more suitable, accurate, or widely applicable than other descriptions (such as bride theft, capture, abduction, kidnapping or forced marriage, as well as terms in local languages). Rather, marriage by capture is used because it was the anthropologist John Ferguson McLennan, paving the way for critical engagement with the practice in scholarship, who first coined the expression in his pioneering 1865 publication Primitive Marriage. Acknowledging the existence of marriage by capture, the reasons why it emerges and is perpetuated and its consequences is important, since it allows us to recognise in a culturally sensitive way why the blanket term ‘rape’ is not always, from an emic perspective, a helpful description. Use of the concept ‘marriage by capture’ is particularly advantageous for analysing the two separate but similar examples of the practice in Judges 21, perhaps the only instance of marriage by capture in the Hebrew Bible. Here the practice reveals numerous striking and suggestive issues concerning the themes of relatedness, or kinship, and of unity. Also exposed are central tensions in the text surrounding the meanings attributed to unity and to tradition.

My intention in this research was to try to understand the reasons why marriage by capture occurs cross-culturally and how it might be helpful in the interpretation of an ancient text. The use of social anthropology was never intended to promote cultural relativism in a way that celebrates the practice of marriage by capture. Instead, I hoped to gain an insight into how the system operates and why it is sometimes understood, from an emic perspective, as a semi legitimate practice. I am currently in the process of applying for funding to work with a charity on forced marriage practices in the hope of exposing the devastating perils of linking a captured bride's return home – a brave, often dangerous move which involves incredible courage and mettle – with shame and dishonour.