Yeah, and I want to start off by acknowledging you for the true bigness of your willingness to be so gracious about the introductory statement in my earlier post.
Please bear with me as I disagree further (
):
Samuel, I almost think you need a blinking road sign that accompanies many of these like-minded posts you make, because you have a tendency to vigorously assert advice that is far too
discouraging to
men -- and, in weighting the scales the way you do, you under-represent not only the responsibilities of the others (most notably wives and children) but misrepresent Scripture in the process (I will
not drown us in a list of scriptures that assert male authority and/or female/child partial responsibility but assert that you should feel free to cite passages that support your position that makes a man
solely responsible for everything everyone else in his family is experiencing, most especially their emotional states).
I would assert (a) that 'the 99' are entirely capable of significantly contributing to their own security, their own protection and to the filling of their own bellies [a man being where the buck stops doesn't mean he has to do everything]; and (b) that 'they have nothing to complain about' even if the level of security, provisioning and protection is not entirely to their liking (again, as long as significant abuse or neglect are not part of the picture).
Yeah, sure, of course, but you front-loaded that with such an overly-broad conjecture:
and then followed it with a horror-show example:
that your concluding assertion:
sounds good but in actuality only legitimately applies to your one provided example.
I can easily agree with and support a declaration that, if a shepherd leaves the 99 other sheep already in his possession out where the wolves could get them while he puts all his effort into finding 1 other sheep, then that shepherd is a terrible steward of what he has been entrusted with.
However, to assert, "If a shepherd is so focused on finding the 1 that he neglected the needs of the 99, that shepherd is a terrible steward of what he has been entrusted with," is to overstate the case. Oh, sure, sometimes some men go overboard in their quests to find additional wives, but the regular warnings smack more of paranoid caution than they do of any true reflection of men being 'terrible stewards' (and you already know what I believe about how this paranoid caution tends to reward the wrong people to congregate at biblicalfamilies.org while disincentivizing those who provide the most valuable participation in and support to the organization).
The much more pertinent concern is whether or not 1st wives and their own children whom they hypnotize to become Amen Choirs aren't making every effort to ensure that they remain the sole beneficiaries of a man's largesse.
'So focused' too often would be more accurately phrased, 'More focused than
we want him to be,' and my emphasis is on 'want,' because in most circumstances it's not even a matter of any
needs being neglected but instead the full range of
desires that 1st wives and their children consider themselves entitled to demand from their husbands and fathers.
In most cases, is it a matter of risking 'losing' more of the already-existing flock? Or
is it more accurately described as the existing flock threatening to mutiny or abandon the man if the already-existing flock doesn't accomplish manipulating the man into bending to their will?
My gut-level reaction to this declaration is that the 1st Shepherdess ought to be damn glad that the Shepherd devoted as much time, effort, diversion and even sacrifice to bring
her into his flock in the first place -- and every one of the 1st Shepherdess's Sheep children should be monumentally more appreciative of that time, effort, diversion and sacrifice than the 1st Shepherdess, because had he not exhibited it back then
they wouldn't even exist. Just who
are they that they believe they have the authority to judge or even comprehend why their Shepherd would seek to take on another Shepherdess and 99 more Sheep (not to mention that it probably wasn't even possible to end up with 99 sheep with only one Shepherdess!)?
This is reminding me of my Masculinity Prescriptions thread and also making me wonder, Samuel, why you didn't continue participating there where you and I left off, my good man:
https://biblicalfamilies.org/forum/threads/are-we-not-mules-we-are-devo.16887/post-265450
I do not accept that the parable of the talents in any way has applicability here except perhaps as a tangential matter.
The parable of the talents is about the earning of rewards, about multiplying abundance --
and that may be the crux of the misunderstanding of the legitimacy of and/or purpose of biblical polygyny. Polygyny isn't about multiplying abundance; it's first and foremost a matter of providing abundance to those who currently have none (or helping them escape poverty and despair). I have a visceral negative reaction any time I recognize that I'm
lusting (and I'm using that word not in the inaccurate modern vernacular as being exclusively sexual but in its more proper Paulian usage as overly longing for anything) for an additional wife or, for that matter, any time I observe any man here or at a Biblical Families gathering or anywhere else introducing his 2nd or 3rd wife in a way that either implies that he's predominantly the recipient of additional blessings (no matter what blessings he's hinting at) or indicates that he's somehow demonstrated evidence that he's to be more highly revered. As for the latter, no matter what level of 'accomplishment' is indicated by having multiple wives, it's cringeworthy to puff oneself up about it, but, as for the former, no matter what level of blessing a wife
is, she is
always more of a burden than a blessing over the course of a marriage. I'll address in a subsequent post my thoughts about assuming that the presence of wives is consistently a reflection of whether a man has proven himself worthy in the sight of God, but I'll assert here that no man for whom his wife is more of a blessing than a burden will ever have a second simultaneous wife in the absence of the 1st wife leading the charge for a 2nd one, because, by their nature, women
expect men to accept that women are more burden than blessing; in fact, for women, marriage's primary purpose is to shift her burdens onto a man -- that's part of the nature of hypergamy. If a woman perceives that she will be more of a blessing to a man than a burden, then she's going to keep looking until she finds one who will put up more with her than she has to put up with him.
This is why I so repetitively repeat that, at its core, seeking polygyny on the part of a man is predominantly an act of generosity. There is selfishness involved, but I assume with great confidence that YHWH endowed men with the selfish aspect (sex and reproduction) of what would propel them to take on additional wives so widows and orphans would be covered, because otherwise men would lack sufficient motivation to be as generous as it is to take on the responsibility of one woman, much less two or three.
