Well, this thread people thought would die is now three threads. One on provision, one solely about MGTOW, and a further one about divorce
Thats fun.
Oh, and the legitimacy of Jasher is in the mix too. My how it's grown.
They can't even have been offering to waive the 'shall not diminish' law, as that law protects existing wives and isn't part of the negotiation for new ones.
Talking about having enough income is almost anachronistic when we're talking about a pre-urbanized culture.
So many parts about this discussion just don't fit into a modern, urban, post-industrial, fiat, economy. Does he not have enough head of cattle to feed his family? He can hunt. Realistically he could have next to no income but still be wealthy in grain and goods stores, or he may have little but is able to fish or hunt more and so provide food.
The bigger thing is that there was no such thing as polygamy as we think about it in scripture. The New Testament just barely came in the same time-frame as the Roman ideal of Monogamy. The women can hardly be repenting by polygamy if polygamy is not unusual. They're merely desperate.
I agree in a sense accepting polygyny can be a way to repent of feminism. But the very act of seeing singleness as a shame, being an unmarried women who is not devoted to the church, that is quite enough. The polygyny view would be an extreme repentance I think. It could be done.
MGTOW is wrong about women marrying for provision. They marry for headship, for intimacy, for sheer attraction. But rarely do they marry for provision. As I've been saying women have always been able to work and provide for themselves. Women who marry only for provision are often vilified even by secular women. Gold digger is still a slur, even when slut isn't.
Women are weaker, but not incapable. And as I said before the '50s culture that opposed women producing anything other than the increasingly easy work of maintaining a household is part of what got us here in the first place. It's wrong. Set her hands to work on productive things and she'll be happier than if you keep her like a porcelain doll on a shelf. She's made to help, so set to to whatever she is good at helping with.
The OT requirement is not to reneg your contract. If you agree that a woman receives x portion of food and y portion of clothing and z amount of housing and sex you can't reduce any of those things to provide for a new woman. The contractual part of marriage comes out more when we start talking about pastoral cultures of the Old Testament. But as I said before, it doesn't really matter if the first wife sheered the sheep and knit the clothing all by herself or if you did. Her production goes to your household. If you agreed she gets one piece of clothing every two weeks thats what she's entitled too, if she creates four articles of clothing in that time and you take two of them for another wife or to sell them or one is made for you and you wear it that is fulfilling your provision to her. This too is part of being master of a household. The larger part in fact. We produce as much or more than anyone else, but our main responsibility is to organize, allocate, and plan.
We don't think like masters of a household when we get away from this. We think of ourselves as the servant primarily when we say that a man should be the one who produces all the food and wealth and she just cooks a bit and tosses dirty things in machines to take care of them. We made ourselves servants, thus as you say women and children are our masters.
You're right about repentance.
That specific situtituation wasn't layed out under Torah though it came after the Messiah.
