Hi, @Pacman.
You are correct about the example being ridiculous. It was meant to be ridiculous, but it was not intended to ridicule you.
My questions are entirely sincere. As I wrote somewhere, it's unlikely that I'm going to be become a Torah Keeper or that I will alter my entire life to correct for all past decisions to line up with everything I learn here, but I can promise this: what I ultimately learn will significantly affect my life in a fruit-of-the-spirit way. That's how serious I am.
At the same time, I'm going to bring my personality into the discussion, so that I crack wise and/or behave irreverently shouldn't be a surprise.
Again, it's a ridiculous example, but it's not out of context, because I very purposefully narrowed down what I was responding to to the issue I'd already been writing about regarding the cowardice of failing to either approve or refuse. Now, if I misrepresented you there by making my focus too narrow, please tell me how I've done that, and I will read carefully what you write and am prepared to acknowledge that I'm wrong in this (or any other) instance. I'm so verbose I'm almost guaranteed to be wrong about things on a fairly regular basis.
But the ridiculous example was only intended to ridicule the stance that refusing to take a stance isn't cowardice. I didn't even get the impression that supporting that kind of cowardice was your primary point in what you were writing; that's why I divorced that part of your statement from everything else, because I took it more to be an example that you had probably just unconsciously passed along that sentiment. I probably should have written that in my response. My only excuse is that I am constantly squeezing my verbosity here into every spare sliver of time I find on my hands during my almost-always-busy days.
Well, of course it is, because I've been saying a lot of things in the course of this deep discussion. I have a rather large number of questions related to how we determine when marriage or one-fleshedness or, as you put it, ttwcm ensues, and I'm asking all of them I can think of. Don't infer that every one of my questions implies that I have my own definitive answers for each of those questions, because that's not the case -- and I would assert that this is one of those discussions within which one can't possible escape contradictions.
It is also the case that my viewpoint about much of this has been evolving as the discussion proceeds, and in one significant realm it very much evolved toward your point of view and then, not because of anything you wrote but because of other factors, it evolved back away from your point of view, although certainly not all the way back. If you can point out exactly what it was I said before that was different, it's probably pretty likely that I'll completely agree with you that it's different.
Thanks, and bingo. And, to @steve's point, if he does so he's at fault via cowardice in regard to protecting his daughter. Certainly it's a failure to protect his daughter if the man literally stole his daughter and robbed her of her virginity, but even in many cases it's a failure to protect his daughter if the daughter and the man jointly colluded in eloping. Many, but I'd still say not most cases, whether in today's culture or in 6th century BC culture.
As far as the bride price goes, I think Exodus 22:17 addresses this by referring to "according to the bride-price for virgins" [CVOT, italics added], which reads like something that would commonly be considered the bride-price rather than something set by the father. Other passages, though, do refer to fathers setting bride-prices, and somewhere, sometime, I read a rabbinical commentary about men purposefully refusing to pay the asking price for a willing daughter, because the father's set amount was excessive and the issue would then be taken to the religious leaders, who would expect the husband to pay a more common fee. No doubt a certain amount of supply-and-demand capitalism went on with fathers asking more for more desirable daughters, but it would seem that measures were in place to prevent price gouging, which would not have protected the daughters, given that an opportunistic father could force his daughter to only be able to marry some rich ogre of a man by setting the price higher than any of the other suitors could rustle up.
You are correct about the example being ridiculous. It was meant to be ridiculous, but it was not intended to ridicule you.
My questions are entirely sincere. As I wrote somewhere, it's unlikely that I'm going to be become a Torah Keeper or that I will alter my entire life to correct for all past decisions to line up with everything I learn here, but I can promise this: what I ultimately learn will significantly affect my life in a fruit-of-the-spirit way. That's how serious I am.
At the same time, I'm going to bring my personality into the discussion, so that I crack wise and/or behave irreverently shouldn't be a surprise.
Again, it's a ridiculous example, but it's not out of context, because I very purposefully narrowed down what I was responding to to the issue I'd already been writing about regarding the cowardice of failing to either approve or refuse. Now, if I misrepresented you there by making my focus too narrow, please tell me how I've done that, and I will read carefully what you write and am prepared to acknowledge that I'm wrong in this (or any other) instance. I'm so verbose I'm almost guaranteed to be wrong about things on a fairly regular basis.
But the ridiculous example was only intended to ridicule the stance that refusing to take a stance isn't cowardice. I didn't even get the impression that supporting that kind of cowardice was your primary point in what you were writing; that's why I divorced that part of your statement from everything else, because I took it more to be an example that you had probably just unconsciously passed along that sentiment. I probably should have written that in my response. My only excuse is that I am constantly squeezing my verbosity here into every spare sliver of time I find on my hands during my almost-always-busy days.
Well, of course it is, because I've been saying a lot of things in the course of this deep discussion. I have a rather large number of questions related to how we determine when marriage or one-fleshedness or, as you put it, ttwcm ensues, and I'm asking all of them I can think of. Don't infer that every one of my questions implies that I have my own definitive answers for each of those questions, because that's not the case -- and I would assert that this is one of those discussions within which one can't possible escape contradictions.
It is also the case that my viewpoint about much of this has been evolving as the discussion proceeds, and in one significant realm it very much evolved toward your point of view and then, not because of anything you wrote but because of other factors, it evolved back away from your point of view, although certainly not all the way back. If you can point out exactly what it was I said before that was different, it's probably pretty likely that I'll completely agree with you that it's different.
Thanks, and bingo. And, to @steve's point, if he does so he's at fault via cowardice in regard to protecting his daughter. Certainly it's a failure to protect his daughter if the man literally stole his daughter and robbed her of her virginity, but even in many cases it's a failure to protect his daughter if the daughter and the man jointly colluded in eloping. Many, but I'd still say not most cases, whether in today's culture or in 6th century BC culture.
As far as the bride price goes, I think Exodus 22:17 addresses this by referring to "according to the bride-price for virgins" [CVOT, italics added], which reads like something that would commonly be considered the bride-price rather than something set by the father. Other passages, though, do refer to fathers setting bride-prices, and somewhere, sometime, I read a rabbinical commentary about men purposefully refusing to pay the asking price for a willing daughter, because the father's set amount was excessive and the issue would then be taken to the religious leaders, who would expect the husband to pay a more common fee. No doubt a certain amount of supply-and-demand capitalism went on with fathers asking more for more desirable daughters, but it would seem that measures were in place to prevent price gouging, which would not have protected the daughters, given that an opportunistic father could force his daughter to only be able to marry some rich ogre of a man by setting the price higher than any of the other suitors could rustle up.
