As I understood the story, they could not eat of the priest’s allotments unless they were in his family and marriage accomplished that, so that he “saved” 300 women.
That’s what it said. However, the fact is (according to the story), there was plenty of food. The food was concentrated in a few hands, rather than available to all.
It’s true, as a simple matter of economics, that one way to allocate food resources is for the man who controls them to use them to buy other people, but it’s difficult to consider that a religious ideal.