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The Revolting Man

The Revolting Man

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Our favorite false teacher is at it again. He needs some sharp minded men and especially right minded women to explain to him all the ways he’s an idiot.

 
The argument David Wilbur (ak 2 me as Mr. Ed) makes comes down to not only elevating traditional extra-scriptural texts over Torah Itself but demonstrating a consistent pattern of especially preferring tradition that agrees with his pre-existing point of view and reinforces his life choices as being the supposedly most righteous choices any human could make. This is fascism, pure and simple.

In this video, he also consistently glosses over the "as a rival" aspect of Lev. 18:18. [Strike the remainder of what I'm now putting in brackets, as @Bartato inspired me to further refine my interpretation of Lev. 18:18 (I will further clarify in a message below): I happen to agree with him about one point, and that is that it's overly literal to limit Lev. 18:18 as only applying to birth-family sisters: elsewhere in Scripture the same Hebrew phrase is meant to apply to fellow women as 'sisters;' thus, Lev. 18:18 can easily be read as a prohibition specifically against taking any two women as wives for the purpose of vexxing those two women or making them rivals.] Levitus 18:18 does not declare that, if two wives (or two potential sister wives) manufacture their own rivalry, that creates a prohibition against having them both as wives. It would, instead, be an instance in which the man was called to be a stronger leader who would remain committed to insisting that the women diminish their rivalry. And thus he would not be said to be marrying them for the purpose of vexxing them. No man should ever marry a woman to vex either her or another woman to whom he's already married. Mr. Ed asserts that absence of rivalry is impossible between sister wives and completely dismisses the possibility that YHWH could be addressing the intent to create rivalry, as if that were something unworthy of being addressed. He might think otherwise if I were to invite him and Pete Rambo to a dinner party, seat them adjacent to each other and pepper the two with provocative comments throughout the gathering. If Lev. 18:18 instead read, "And you shall not invite a man to be a rival to a brother, by seating them next to each other at a dinner party in his lifetime," would Mr. Ed then consider that an absolute prohibition against all shared meals?

YHWH didn't waste words; if he meant to prohibit all polygyny, He would have just said, "You shall not take more than one woman to under her nakedness." Or does Mr. Ed believe that YHWH was asserting that creating rivalry was the only motivation behind men marrying additional wives? He once again entirely misses the point, a situation probably brought about by his commitment to full validation of his preexisting bias.

I have two remaining declarations:
  1. I continue to fail to care what Mr. Ed says about this or anything else; in fact, I am somewhat pleased that he isn't a fan of polygyny. His cadence is almost consistently that of someone narrating an NPR documentary, and he would make a poor poster boy for Biblical polygamy, but
  2. I'm already looking forward to watching the next podcast you post here, @The Revolting Man, in which you tells us just how you really feel about Mr. Ed -- or should I say Mrs. Ed?
Mr. Ed demonstrates that his guiding motivation in life is to curry favor with the general culture's feminists he is very comfortable being ruled by. He seeks higher degrees of approval from them than he does from the Word of YHWH or even from the men who would be his fellow patriarchs if he were actually seeking that level of manhood.
 
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Keith Martin said:
The argument David Wilbur (ak 2 me as Mr. Ed) makes comes down to not only elevating traditional extra-scriptural texts over Torah Itself but demonstrating a consistent pattern of especially preferring tradition that agrees with his pre-existing point of view and reinforces his life choices as being the supposedly most righteous choices any human could make. This is fascism, pure and simple.

In this video, he also consistently glosses over the "as a rival" aspect of Lev. 18:18. I happen to agree with him about one point, and that is that it's overly literal to limit Lev. 18:18 as only applying to birth-family sisters: elsewhere in Scripture the same Hebrew phrase is meant to apply to fellow women as 'sisters;' thus, Lev. 18:18 can easily be read as a prohibition specifically against taking any two women as wives for the purpose of vexxing those two women or making them rivals. Neither does it declare that, if two wives (or two potential sister wives) manufacture their own rivalry, that creates a prohibition against having them both as wives. It would, instead, be an instance in which the man was called to be a stronger leader who would remain committed to insisting that the women diminish their rivalry. And thus he would not be said to be marrying them for the purpose of vexxing them. No man should ever marry a woman to vex either her or another woman to whom he's already married. Mr. Ed asserts that absence of rivalry is impossible between sister wives and completely dismisses the possibility that YHWH could be addressing the intent to create rivalry, as if that were something unworthy of being addressed. He might think otherwise if I were to invite him and Pete Rambo to a dinner party, seat them adjacent to each other and pepper the two with provocative comments throughout the gathering. If Lev. 18:18 instead read, "And you shall not invite a man to be a rival to a brother, by seating them next to each other at a dinner party in his lifetime," would Mr. Ed then consider that an absolute prohibition against all shared meals?

YHWH didn't waste words; if he meant to prohibit all polygyny, He would have just said, "You shall not take more than one woman to under her nakedness." Or does Mr. Ed believe that YHWH was asserting that creating rivalry was the only motivation behind men marrying additional wives? He once again entirely misses the point, a situation probably brought about by his commitment to full validation of his preexisting bias.

I have two remaining declarations:
  1. I continue to fail to care what Mr. Ed says about this or anything else; in fact, I am somewhat pleased that he isn't a fan of polygyny. His cadence is almost consistently that of someone narrating an NPR documentary, and he would make a poor poster boy for Biblical polygamy, but
  2. I'm already looking forward to watching the next podcast you post here, @The Revolting Man, in which you tells us just how you really feel about Mr. Ed -- or should I say Mrs. Ed?
Mr. Ed demonstrates that his guiding motivation in life is to curry favor with the general culture's feminists he is very comfortable being ruled by. He seeks higher degrees of approval from them than he does from the Word of YHWH or even from the men who would be his fellow patriarchs if he were actually seeking that level of manhood.
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I think you make very good points here. I agree that a man shouldn't take multiple wives for the purpose of vexing anyone. This intentional vexation is an important piece of Leviticus 18:18.

Still, I would also insist that actual sisters are in view here. Almost everything in the larger passage deals with family relations in regard to sexuality (prohibiting incest).

Marrying two sisters isn't incest, but understanding this verse to deal with actual sisters does seem most consistent with the larger context.
 
Bartato said:
Still, I would also insist that actual sisters are in view here. Almost everything in the larger passage deals with family relations in regard to sexuality (prohibiting incest).

Marrying two sisters isn't incest, but understanding this verse to deal with actual sisters does seem most consistent with the larger context.
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I agree, and I think that limiting it to blood sisters sets a much higher bar as to what a rival is.
I see nothing wrong with taking a wife that, however you define it, would be considered a rival to your wife in the process of helping your wife to grow into a better person. If she remains a rival, that would indicate failure in her choices to walk a walk pleasing to Yah.
 
Bartato said:
I think you make very good points here. I agree that a man shouldn't take multiple wives for the purpose of vexing anyone. This intentional vexation is an important piece of Leviticus 18:18.

Still, I would also insist that actual sisters are in view here. Almost everything in the larger passage deals with family relations in regard to sexuality (prohibiting incest).

Marrying two sisters isn't incest, but understanding this verse to deal with actual sisters does seem most consistent with the larger context.
Click to expand...

Dr. Luck digs into this passage and the phrase used referencing sisters in 18:18 is used in other biblical passages, but if memory serves me, it’s very rare for that phrase to be used with people. Mostly it refers to inanimate objects. So its’ somewhat unique usage in 18:18 would seem to be referring to actual sisters.
 
So the beliefs of one Jewish sect should dictate the definition of acceptable marriage. Even if so many things in Scripture are damaged by that belief.
Yes Wilber, your fetish is obvious.
You have to be right at any cost. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the majority of women will lay palm fronds in your path for sticking up for their truth.
 
steve said:
So the beliefs of one Jewish sect should dictate the definition of acceptable marriage. Even if so many things in Scripture are damaged by that belief.
Yes Wilber, your fetish is obvious.
You have to be right at any cost. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the majority of women will lay palm fronds in your path for sticking up for their truth.
Click to expand...
The Essenes weren’t even really a Jewish sect. They came from Judaism but they were quite different and mainstream Jews rejected them.
 
Re: Essenes at Qumran, they valued asceticism, therefore celibacy was preferred to marriage. Some archeologists believe women lived in a separate community altogether. Therefore if celibacy were a higher ideal, then polygyny was a selfserving greater evil. Ironically, this is the very argument Tertullian used two centuries later for monogamy-only before he himself converted to a 'sexless marriage.' After his wife died, he became a Montanist, a recognized cult...
 
And, any engagement in that video's comments is appreciated, though I'm choosing to stay out of it as he'll hear nothing from me.
 
There comes a point where all the facts are stacked against his arguments.
And He’s either intellectually dishonest , to stupid to understand (it looks like dishonesty to me) or a bit of both.
Anyways , to continue to debate with someone that’s dishonest or stupid is a waste of time and you run the risk of degrading your own profile by continental engagement with fools.
My 2cents
 
Bartato said:
Almost everything in the larger passage deals with family relations in regard to sexuality (prohibiting incest).

Marrying two sisters isn't incest, but understanding this verse to deal with actual sisters does seem most consistent with the larger context.
Click to expand...

Great point, @Bartato. Thank you for causing me to fine-tune my understanding of Scripture through some additional Bible study tonight. I made an edit (above) to reflect that, because this has taken me back off the fence to the point of concluding that it has to only be talking about actual biological sisters.

The overall context is this: Leviticus 18:6-18 articulates the prohibitions related to sexual relationships with near kin. :6 is the general prohibition. :7-16 are the specific individual examples of prohibited near kin. And :17 and :18 are further clarifications, and :18 actually also clarifies a couple other things, which are the absence of general prohibitions against women being intimate with other women and against a man being intimate with more than one of his wives at the same time.

The vexxing aspect is actually the less significant subject matter in these two verses.

The greater (i.e., more significant) interpretation, to me, of this verse hinges on the fact that, once again, that "uncovering the nakedness of" phrase is used, which was unquestioned idiomatic expression for penetrative intercourse. I might have missed it, but Mr. Ed didn't even address the fact that Lev. 18:18 is itself a clarifying verse within the near-kin prohibition section of Leviticus, attempting to claim that it starts a new section that belongs with unclean-sex section that follows the near-kin section. Not only does 18:18 bookend the near-kin section, it also follows 18:17, which is another clarifying verse citing a different near-kin prohibition. In the cases of :17 and :18, it's not the man who is one of the near-kin; it's his wives, and the Hebrew is slightly different in these verses compared to the previous verses in regard to "uncovering the nakedness of" or, as is used in my favorite translation, "exposing his/her nakedness." In :17a, the significant difference is a matter of the choice of conjunctions, as well as the emphasis being on both women's nakedness being exposed; this verse becomes necessary given that there is no general prohibition against exposing the nakedness of more than one wife simultaneously; however, in the case of a mother/daughter pair of wives, or as in :17b the case of a grandmother and granddaughter, exposing their nakedness together at the same time would be a violation of the general prohibition against sex between near kin -- even in the case of just having two wives undress in front of a man, it's still a type of having sex together no matter how careful a man could be about preventing his mother wife and daughter/granddaughter wife from physically touching, because it would still be a situation in which they would be incited to arousal by watching the other being intimate with their man. (We have discussed this elsewhere and members have a variety of opinions about whether this is an absolute prohibition against marrying both a woman and her mother, or if it's prohibiting taking them sexually together at the same time.)

With :18, the distinction from the general pattern is slightly different: "And you shall not take a woman to be a rival to her sister, by exposing her nakedness to her in her lifetime." [CVOT] In addition to wedding a woman for the purpose of being a rival, instead of referring to the exposure of nakedness being a matter of exposing the prohibited nakedness to the man in question, this verse is specifically prohibiting "exposing her [the 2nd wife's] nakedness to her [the 1st wife] -- a prohibition against two sisters being sexual with each other.

Mr. Ed is merely engaging in wishful thinking, because he wants to consider polygamy to be a dirty, shameful exercise. He offers no proof that Lev. 18:18 is the lead verse of a new section instead of being the wrap-up verse of the near-kin section, and by this failure also fails to recognize his own bias.

In truth, the existence of Lev. 18:17-18 is one of the most powerful scriptural pieces of evidence of the legitimacy of polygyny, because if polygyny were not considered acceptable by Yah, then there would be no need whatsoever to articulate prohibitions against two particular female-male-female polygyny configurations. As I wrote above, Yah didn't waste words. Instead of pussyfooting around as is Mr. Ed's wont, Yah would have just said, "Thou shalt not engage in nakedness-uncovering with more than one woman, even if they live in different houses and you alternate nights with them."
 
steve said:
Yes Wilber, your fetish is obvious.
You have to be right at any cost. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the majority of women will lay palm fronds in your path for sticking up for their truth.
Click to expand...

I've written somewhere else in a different context that Mr. Ed is engaging in unconscious but definitive mental adultery with all the women he's trying to impress. It comes down to being one of the Sensitive New Age Guy's favorite seduction techniques. If you can't rope or ride or shoot, your next best bet is to woo women by convincing them that you feel their pain.
 
I've been following this debate - by the way y'all all got a new follower on youtube now - gotta learn from the brotherhood and gleam insights.

So seeing how much David butchered the polygyny debate, I decided to watch this video as well:

Without asking anyone to invest too much time - I'm curious if people on here would side with him or Tony in this debate. Also curious as to whether anyone would think David represented the 'Keep Torah' side with more intellectual honesty and rightful attitude towards scripture and his anti-polygyny stances? In other words, is this guy a mixed bag? Can we really be blind in one eye and see completely well in the other?
 
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