Excellent point, and that does lead toward the conclusion that failure to refuse is equivalent to giving her to him, but it doesn't answer the question to which I'm seeking an answer, which is whether the relationship receives full favor -- or whether, in the eyes of YHWH, it needs to find full favor (because maybe it already does; maybe the only issue is getting that bride price paid). Numbers 30, on the other hand, actually mentions the answer to what happens in the case of a husband nullifying her vows: YHWH then pardons her, which is a clear indication that making the vows in the first place was, at best, inappropriate, if it needs to be pardoned. The Exodus passage does not have a phrase that indicates that YHWH either pardons enticer and enticee or that their union is now to be considered acceptable or unacceptable.
I think you've hit the central problem with your position right here. You appear to have been assuming that a marriage must be accepted or even blessed by the father to be valid, hence here too:
Neither does it assert that it isn't acceptable in the eyes of YHWH, but it does not create equivalence between failure to refuse and acceptance/blessing. In fact, the passage isn't even about whether the union is acceptable long-term; the passage's sole purpose is to assert that a man who entices a non-betrothed virgin is compelled to offer up a standard bride price to the father and that he has to pay it even if the father refuses to accept the union as a marriage. Nowhere does that passage assert that failure to refuse implies acceptance, and to assert otherwise is to add to Scripture.
Wrong. Yes, I've recently indicated that I'm leaning in that direction, but it's probably best that you not assume what I'm assuming, because your assumption was incorrect. I wasn't
assuming or
asserting that a marriage
must be accepted by the father to be valid; my point was that failure to refuse is not the equivalent of acceptance. In each case, you took partial sentences out of context. In each case, I pointed out that these passages are not definitive either on their own or in tandem.
I don't see that in scripture. All we have is a statement that the father can refuse to give his daughter to the man who took her virginity. That's all.
Again, wrong. You're glossing over the
primary points of the passage, which are (a) that adultery has occurred, and (b) that the enticer has to pay a bride price, whether the father accepts the offer to marry her or refuses it. Nothing is written about the consequences of the enticer and enticee ignoring the potential refusal. Are you adding to Scripture here either (a) that no possibility exists of refusing to recognize the refusal on the part of the enticer/enticee pair, or (b) that the passage actually addresses the consequences of refusing to recognize the refusal?
As you have pointed out, it doesn't answer the deeper questions you are answering - and I think that is because those questions are based on unscriptural assumptions so are not addressed because they were never under consideration in the first place.
Please identify what you label as "unscriptural assumptions" that "are not addressed because they were never under consideration in the first place."
Making it all simple again, "this thing we call marriage" is the possession of a woman by a man.
Possession.
Possession is not just 9/10ths of the law, in this case it's the whole thing.
If a man has a woman, she is the woman that he has. She is his woman. They are therefore in this thing we call marriage.
You make it clear that you consider it to be simple, but considering possession the whole thing is patently false on its face, and you can't change that by just saying so. We can start the unraveling of
that sweater by simply mentioning cases of kidnapping and rape. Man takes a woman away from her home against her will to a location remote from her family and eventually rapes her. Man
has woman, so, according to you, she is the woman that he has and therefore she is his woman -- and therefore they are in this thing you call marriage.
Furthermore, if possession were "the whole thing," then the existence of a bride price would be meaningless. As others have already pointed out, that leads to legitimizing theft in the context of a daughter being the possession of her father. This brings us back to where you shift the goal posts back and forth with your Choice #3, which you originally labeled as, "Possession / Either forms a marriage" and then described as meaning, "if you have a woman and nobody else objects, she's your wife." You clarified that by asserting that Possession was a stand-in for the presence of either consummation or a covenant, but you're conveniently dancing back and forth among differing standards, effectively failing to distinguish among apples, oranges and pears. If we're not talking about fatherly refusal, then both parental consent and the bride price are entirely irrelevant, so anything related to those issues can not be properly used as confirmation of possession being either proof of union or approved by YHWH. If, however, we
are talking about fatherly refusal, then the only covenant that matters is the one made with the father, in which case if the man in the matter (enticer or enticee) runs off with the recent-virgin woman and you're going to assert as you have claimed it is so simple to do that they are indeed
married, then the
only thing that defines their situation as being one-flesh is the sexual consummation, which instead of being so
simple is actually evidence that you have proved that your #3 (either/or) position is invalid, because you have walked straight into describing a situation that you assert is a marriage but is devoid of what would have been considered a legitimate covenant. The result is that only #1 and #4 choices would remain standing as possibilities.
There I was leaning toward thinking that maybe either possession or consummation or maybe even both were required for the union to be fully legitimate, and you have convinced me to lean back in the direction of sexual consummation being the
whole thing (either that or a combination of consummation and not yet being divorced), still holding out for the potential that #4 (both) could be a reasonable conclusion.
Scripture is very clear that her father had the right to refuse to give her to him - and that is protection for a woman built into the Law. But there is absolutely no scripture I can think of (correct me if I am wrong) that states that every marriage MUST have the approval of the woman's father to be valid. If he chose not to refuse to give her to him, then she's with him. By default, she is now his. That's just reality.
Because of your false assumptions about my assumptions, this is mostly a red herring, but here again you fail to address the situation in which the father refuses but the man and woman go ahead and keep hanging out together and regularly uncovering each other's nakedness? Are you asserting that that possibility is just unthinkable? Or, are
you assuming within your assertion here that fatherly approval is required? If the latter, are the two who have essentially eloped considered to be married/one-flesh/ttwcm'd? And, if not, then how are they
not one-flesh while a john and his harlot
are one-flesh?
I realize that you went on to answer these questions . . .
if he refuses but does not have the ability to enforce his refusal (e.g. if [the virgin-snatcher] brings a gang and steals her anyway, or if she elopes with him against her father's wishes), I see nothing in scripture to say she is not his wife. On the contrary, there are regulations about women captured in war that make it very clear that a captured woman does become a man's wife. In most cases the father would either object strongly or would have been killed in order to steal her. It's an evil situation, not something I am endorsing at all. But it happens, even today. And scripture is clear that once it has happened, if he and her form a marriage-type relationship, it is a real marriage.
The blessing of a father is a very good thing. But it is not essential for marriage to exist, so the lack of it does not invalidate a marriage.
Is that the sound of another nail in the coffin of the either/or situation?
I want to acknowledge that I may be entirely wrong about this, but I'm now expecting an argument that one could be married without ever consummating the marriage. Hypothetical example situation: father sells daughter to an impotent man who has 0 sexual desire and 0 willingness to even meet his purchased bride's due-benevolence needs. The 'marriage' is never consummated. This, I assert, as well as any other comparable example, is absurd. It's not a marriage any more than someone who is betrothed but not yet consummated is a marriage.
Please tell me how you haven't, all on your own, proved that sexual congress is an essential component but covenant is not, given that you've acknowledged that it would be considered a marriage if the two eloped without the father's blessing?
If you wish to propose that, you need to find some scripture to back it up. On this, you are the one making the most radical proposal, and need to find proof of it.
I didn't propose that, so I wouldn't need to waste my time looking for proof of it. Here's what I asserted I was researching:
Given the potential ramifications mentioned by Samuel in his OP and subsequently, however, the fact that the box isn't a nice neat little one doesn't leave me concluding that I can just let myself off the hook, either, though. I'm going to continue my informal research, as I suspect that, somewhere in Scripture (given that I doubt our Creator would have left something that important entirely out of His Word) He provides guidance regarding the situation of a non-consummated widowed betrothed woman. My further suspicion is that informal research is unlikely to uncover anything, so that means I'm looking at Episode 10 of reading Scripture cover-to-cover, keeping in mind the entire time, verse-by-verse that I'm specifically looking for that very particular situation. Because an answer to that dilemma has the potential to take us over the mountain and into the valley in regard to when TTWCM begins, what He means by what we call one-flesh in English, and perhaps even what it is that entails Him joining couples together.
I end with this: did you really mean to write this?:
I can't find any,
@Pacman can't find any, so until and unless you find some scripture to back it up I think we should consider it false.
I should repeat that I'm not looking for proof of what you claimed I was making a radical proposal about, but that isn't what bothers me about your last sentence. Samuel, you may be one of the world's topmost authoritative experts on Scripture, but, as much as a danger it is to make assumptions, I'm going to assume that what you meant to write was that, "until and unless you find some scripture to back it up I think we should consider
this to be unproven." Because assuming it to be false just because one hasn't oneself discovered a potential truth is to assume that one is incapable of anything but full knowledge, especially when one asserts that the rest of us
should join one in one's conclusion -- most especially when the one making that assertion is the head of all of our moderators. Your assertions carry more influence than the rest of us can muster because of your status as administrator and moderator.
