White on black crime:
This site: http://topconservativenews.com/2014/12/challenge-name-a-white-on-black-murder-occurring-in-the-past-year/ has an open invitation to the SPLC to tell them all about white on black crime, to be fair and balanced with their (horrific) black on white page.
They get about one white killing a year of a black man not engaged in a felony.
According to the FBI, in 2011, 193 black men were murdered by whites.
But if these were actual murder type murders, should we not expect rather more of the victims to be not engaged in a felony at the time they were killed?
So, just as we see statistical evidence suggesting that the vast majority of rape convictions reflect false rape accusations, we see statistical evidence that the vast majority of convictions of whites for killing blacks reflect self defense.
Our laws should reflect this. Just as Sharia law on rape rightly starts with a very strong presumption that a rape accusation is false, which presumption can only be rebutted by very strong evidence, we should similarly presuppose that white versus black conflicts reflect white self defense, which presumption should only be rebuttable by very strong evidence.
There is ample legal precedent in our system for loading the scales against certain groups, when the group presumed guilty is heterosexual white males. For example VAWA, the violence against women act, presupposes that in any conflict between a man and a women, the man is always guilty. The pattern of convictions of whites for killing blacks suggests we need a violence against whites act.
We must increase the rate of dindu killing exponentially to approach the negro escape velocity, pre-singularity.
did you come here from LessWrong?
You’re calling for the return of Jim Crow laws, the abolition of which has been the Holy Grail of Progressives for the last 100 years. Even in South Africa, where every white person gets robbed at least once a month, many whites cannot accept the truth of this cartoon:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/442689838341688830/
If you dissect America’s identity, and cut away the “all men are created equal” part, what’s left?
To be a reactionary is to call into question much of the “enlightenment”.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men where created unequal, they are endowed by evolution with different temperaments and intellects suited to differing amounts of freedom, with all rights being alienable.
“Don’t generalize!”, my mother scolds whenever I say something about any particular sort of people. But isn’t “all people are equal” the broadest generalization of all?
In public school they taught us that “generalization” is bad while “generality” is OK. Come again?
“Wait a minute,” Jack interrupted. “Before we go any deeper, let’s agree on a definition of sapience.”
Van Riebeek laughed. “Ever try to get a definition of life from a biologist?” he asked. “Or a definition of number from a mathematician?”
“That’s about it.” Ruth looked at the Fuzzies, who were looking at their colored-ball construction as though wondering if they could add anything more without spoiling the design. “I’d say: a level of mentation qualitatively different from nonsapience in that it includes ability to symbolize ideas and store and transmit them, ability to generalize and ability to form abstract ideas. There; I didn’t say a word about talk-and-build-a-fire, did I?”
“Little Fuzzy symbolizes and generalizes,” Jack said. “He symbolizes a damnthing by three horns, and he symbolizes a rifle by a long thing that points and makes noises. Rifles kill animals. Harpies and damnthings are both animals. If a rifle will kill a harpy, it’ll kill a damnthing too.”
Juan Jimenez had been frowning in thought; he looked up and asked, “What’s the lowest known sapient race?”
“Yggdrasil Khooghras,” Gerd van Riebeek said promptly. “Any of you ever been on Yggdrasil?”
“I saw a man shot once on Mimir, for calling another man a son of a Khooghra,” Jack said. “The man who shot him had been on Yggdrasil and knew what he was being called.”
“I spent a couple of years among them,” Gerd said. “They do build fires; I’ll give them that. They char points on sticks to make spears. And they talk. I learned their language, all eighty-two words of it. I taught a few of the intelligentsia how to use machetes without maiming themselves, and there was one mental giant I could trust to carry some of my equipment, if I kept an eye on him, but I never let him touch my rifle or my camera.”
“Can they generalize?” Ruth asked.
“Honey, they can’t do nothin’ else but! Every word in their language is a high-order generalization. _Hroosha_, live-thing. _Noosha_, bad-thing. _Dhishta_, thing-to-eat. Want me to go on? There are only seventy-nine more of them.”
– _Little Fuzzy_, H. Beam Piper
(http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18137)
“If you dissect America’s identity, and cut away the “all men are created equal†part, what’s left?”
Nothing that is recognizable as what America has been.
There _is_, or was, an actual fact-based identity lurking underneath there, of Englishmen in particular and northwest Europeans in general, formed and molded by the experience of colonizing a very sparsely inhabited continent. That identity has been thoroughly covered up by ideology, and the consequences of that ideology have been to dilute and diffuse that identity to the point that there isn’t much of it left.
Which is sad, because it means there can never be another such country, at least not until man starts colonizing other planets. There will be other great nations on Earth, but they’ll have to be far more cunning and ruthless than the Pilgrims if they hope to carve out a living space on this crowded planet.
It doesn’t get more cunning and ruthless than Pilgrims (and Quakers). The current Cathedral gets its unique quality of earnest disingenuity directly from them. Brother Jonathan and all that.
Be cunning when weak, and ruthless when strong. The Pilgrims stumbled onto land recently depopulated by plague. Your ancestors were not so lucky, so they burned Canaan to the ground and killed all its inhabitants (no hard feelings, I’m not Canaanite).
There is no vacant land; every square inch belongs to someone. You can still buy land, as Zionist Jews did in the early 1900s, but don’t expect other tribes to honor the title when they decide they don’t like you.
Of course, no doubt, the only way to have a piece of your own land is to be willing to employ violence. And there were peoples more cunning or ruthless than the Pilgrims. But the Pilgrims and Quakers had that unique quality where they fervently believed that they were killing and starving off their enemies for their own good and for that of all humanity. You know, similar to every future conflict of their heirs.
BTW, just for accuracy’s sake, we didn’t burn down Canaanite cities with one or two exceptions. After killing the inhabitants, we took them over and lived in them, and survived off the captured food.
If you completely wipe out the native population and build a new nation from a small, genetically homogeneous founding stock (e.g. 30,000 middle-class English Puritans), you can then say “all men are created equal”, and not be too far from the truth.
Within two generations or three there would be vast inequality, not only in property but in de facto legal status. We saw this with the Salem witch trials, where the Learned Doctor Mather’s inquests, based on “spectral evidence,” came to a screeching halt when accusations of witchcraft were made against Governor Phillips’ wife.
We maintain the illusion of equality by allowing the poor easy credit to borrow the rich’s savings. When the poor default (because they’re insolvent, not illiquid), make the rich whole with freshly printed money. It’s much more subtle than an outright wealth transfer, though we do that too.
Equality was a useful lie because it (a) motivated everyone to work harder and maximize their potential, and (b) made the rich less sympathetic to the poor (“You should have studied harder in school, like I did!”), so less apt to subsidize their dysgenic breeding.
“Equality was a useful lie because it …(b) made the rich less sympathetic to the poor… so less apt to subsidize their dysgenic breeding.”
We seem to have gone wrong here somewhere, since the egalitarian rich are happily subsidizing dysgenic breeding all over the planet.
Unrelated question.
What are the characteristics of a religion that is resistant to progressivism?
First, you have to shut down the specific beliefs, antigens, of progressivism, similarly as the Spanish shut down the worship of the cannibalistic demon God Huitzilopochtli, whose worship was celebrated with murder and cannibalism, and whose mythos celebrated treachery, murder of kin, incest, sexual mutilation, etc.
Secondly, one has to prevent one’s apparatus for suppressing progressivism from itself developing holier than thou disease, by controlling entry into the priesthood, by preventing priestly competition to be holier than each other.
I have a proposal in “The next official religion“
Maybe we don’t need a religion. Maybe we just need everyone who’s anyone to read The Socialist Phenomenon and The Latter-day Pamphlets, and to know stuff about biology and game theory.
Socialism is the dreaming of the ignorant. If the French aristocracy had known stuff, they might not have abolished their titles.
The problem with that is keeping the pattern of “everyone who’s anyone” behaving in the correct fashion going on for more than a generation or 2. That’s what religion accomplishes: it sets modes of behavior and harnesses pre-existing tendencies within human beings. Relying just on education is precisely what happened with the USA. The colonists circa 1750-1800 were very well educated indeed, by and large. Their descendants aren’t.
the problem was that the educated had no idea how to reply to the uneducated when told that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. So the uneducated won the debates, and ran riot.
People don’t keep themselves clean because cleanliness is next to Godliness any more, but because skin bacteria.
That’s amazingly optimistic.
Another OT, sorry, but this is rather amusing. The Tsar and his people seem to have a rather dim opinion of The Cathedral. They refer to “pindostan”:
http://observer.com/2014/12/russians-rage-against-america/
They make fun of the State Department spokeswoman, who frequently has to defend the indefensible and deny the undeniable. Normally no one notices.
What about the statistics that blacks get killed way more than whites? At least here in Brazil. The cathedral uses this statistic to explain that racism is real.
Blacks get killed way more than whites because they need killing way more than whites.
Thats because most blacks are killed by other blacks. in USA its 85% I think. That means remaining 15% of those who kill them includes latino gangs, and whites (mostly in selfdefense).
They always uses poster childs when reporting black males being killed way more than whites.
OT, muslim terrorists kills 12 at far left media publication in France, proving once more that terror works.
When backed by a state which punishes your opposition very effectively and doesn’t punish you very much at all, terror works great.
DailyStormer was just crowing about how the one guy who shot those three teenagers is finally getting sentenced, and Hamas admits it was a Hamas cell but claims the operation was not authorized by higher-ups ( http://www.dailystormer.com/man-sentenced-for-murder-of-ratfaced-brats-in-the-west-bank/ ). Contrast with all the Golden Dawn MPs being arrested because a guy who had recently started working in their cafeteria stabbed a rapper.
Who is blocking indictments of Hamas leadership? Is Israel’s supreme court as traitorous as th US’s?
B says so. I believe him.
I tell him that for Israel to survive, Judaism rather than progressivism needs to become the official religion, which he does not quite believe, and that Judaism has to change substantially to cease to be a religion of exile and become once again the state religion of Israel, which he does believe, but his idea of substantial change is rather less than mine.
That’s because your idea of change is to take communism (or, more accurately, Modernism,) change all the pluses to minuses and vice versa, and spray paint a Star of David on the hood. My thoughts on this are similar to those expressed by Henry Dampier here: http://www.henrydampier.com/2015/01/thoughts-synthetic-religion/
This is because you are coming from a materialistic framework with materialistic premises, assuming the universe and people run in a linear, logical fashion which lends itself to modeling, and you desire to create a social framework based on that model which maximizes utils, minimizes suffering, etc. These are the same exact underlying premises behind Utilitarianism, Progressivism, Communism and all the other strains of Modernism. You think you will do better because your modeling is more accurate.
My thinking comes from radically different premises. I think that this universe and humans run in linear, modelable fashion within a very large envelope, 99% of the time. Most of the interesting stuff happens within the 1%. I think that the whole thing has a creator who is intimately involved with it, who wants us to have a rulebook and apply it wisely, and whose rulebook has great depth, lending itself to all contexts and situations, including those which could not have been accurately predicted beforehand. I definitely think that it is incumbent on us to read and implement that rulebook in good faith, in humility and with the assumption that previous commentators from whom we got it were acting in good faith and knew what they were writing about, even if we’re not obliged to accept their reasoning in all cases. Meaning, that even if we don’t agree, we need to take their arguments and reasoning seriously and not dismiss them glibly.
Now, of course, I have no crystal ball and can’t see the future (although I seem to be doing alright with the Good Judgement Project, more or less.) But I notice that all systems built on your premises begin to fall apart as soon as they’re implemented, and hold together only due to unprincipled exceptions.
For instance, Peppermint mentioned how people used to keep themselves clean because cleanliness is next to G-dliness, and now they keep themselves clean because of skin bacteria. But the facts are a bit different. First, the idea of washing your hands before eating and after using the bathroom came from Judaism and was completely religiously motivated. Throwing this idea out was one of the first things that Jesus did, using a very Jim-like reasoning: the purpose of the commandments is to make us better people, we are smart enough to know that dirt entering the stomach has no moral effect, therefore, no need for handwashing. European religious fervor had no effect on personal hygiene throughout the middle ages, with the result described by Burton, namely, much higher disease loads and death rates in epidemics than the Jews, who lived in much more squalid quarters next to the Christians. Then, 150 years ago, the theory of sanitation developed, and people started washing because of “bacteria.” Fine. But now we see that, even though they might wash their hands before eating and after using the bathroom (sometimes,) cleanliness is not on the increase, for instance, in the sexual sphere.
The point is that there are many, many aspects of reality which we can’t know at any given point, but which have a huge effect on our lives and societies. The hubristic answer is to say “we know it all and what we don’t know we won’t worry about,” like Jim and Jesus do. The Jewish answer is to say, “we don’t know, but G-d does, so we need to make a constant good faith effort to understand his Law and to follow it regardless of whether we understand.” The first approach has, historically, led to a lot of consumption of fecal matter.
I observe that the old testament prescribes patriarchy, for example that a child may be executed for disobedience. You cheerfully toss this, while doubling down and quadrupling down on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.
Old Testament Judaism was, pretty much, modernism reversed with the star of David on it, plus few odd idiosyncratic details. Exile Judaism doubles down on the odd idiosyncratic details, while replacing the anti modernism of the old testament with modernism.
I wondered how the Talmud dealt with Ruth’s night with Boaz.
Answer: They skip right over it. Reading the Talmudic account, you would think that the conversation between Ruth and Boaz took place at noon, rather than in bed in the middle of the night, and the nearer kinsman, the reason that Boaz gives for not giving Ruth the command that Naomi and Ruth wanted and expected, vanishes from Boaz’s late night reply to Ruth.
You pat yourself on the back about how well you are obeying the commandments about boiling goats in milk, while lightly blowing off the commandments on patriarchy, war, covetousness, and nationalism.
Old Testament Judaism is indeed almost the opposite of modernism. Exile Judaism is sick with modernism, and if it is healthier than what remains of Christianity, that is not much recommendation.
>I observe that the old testament prescribes patriarchy, for example that a child may be executed for disobedience. You cheerfully toss this, while doubling down and quadrupling down on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.
The commandment to execute a rebellious son has a lot of context and restrictions-who can do it, when and how. These restrictions were so extensive that the Torah doesn’t have a single example of a rebellious son being executed. Do you think this is because nobody’s son during the time period under discussion (several millennia) was rebellious? Or that no parents ever got sick of their children’s behavior?
The prohibition against mixing meat and milk has no restrictions (except for saving a life, which overrides almost all prohibitions) and is repeated three times.
To say, hey, this is a minor issue is a Modernist approach. It’s no different than Jesus saying you don’t need to wash your hands before eating (which by the way is a purely Rabbinical commandment.) It presupposes you know better. How many people do you think died in Christian Europe as a result of poor hygiene in the last 2KY?
Obviously, my point is not that cheeseburgers are bad for your health.
>Old Testament Judaism was, pretty much, modernism reversed with the star of David on it, plus few odd idiosyncratic details.
This is the only way you can conceptualize it in your framework, where there is only modernism and its opposite. But you are wrong. And there are no “idiosyncratic details.”
>Exile Judaism doubles down on the odd idiosyncratic details, while replacing the anti modernism of the old testament with modernism.
There was no “modernism” 2000 years ago. There was Hellenism (in its various offshoots) and its application to Judaism by Jesus and his followers. And various crazy cults like Mithraism. What you refer to as “idiosyncratic details” are exactly what kept us from being absorbed by the above.
>I wondered how the Talmud dealt with Ruth’s night with Boaz.
>Answer: They skip right over it.
This is not true. They discuss it at length. For the umpteenth time, when you proclaim yourself an expert on something based on a cursory Google search, it makes you look dumb.
>You pat yourself on the back about how well you are obeying the commandments about boiling goats in milk, while lightly blowing off the commandments on patriarchy, war, covetousness, and nationalism.
There are commandments which apply to all at all times in all places. We are careful to obey them at all times in all places. There are commandments which have a context, and must be done by specific people in a specific time, place, etc. To implement a commandment properly means not doing it when you are not allowed to. For instance, there is a commandment about sin-offerings. Were I to go and drag a goat up on the Temple Mount and sacrifice it (assuming the police didn’t immediately arrest me,) I would not be fulfilling that commandment-I would be violating it. Likewise, the commandments which you vaguely refer to above.
The main context being that the events of the old testament, and the other laws and rules of the Old Testament reflect the kind of absolute patriarchy where a son could indeed be executed for disobedience, where children were the property of their parents, and women the property of men.
Sure there was. Roman marriage was collapsing. With the cultural dominance of Rome, Jews were being tossed into a world strikingly similar in many ways to the modern world, a strong state, while they were accustomed to a state one step away from disorderly anarchy and marriage by consent with rapidly diminishing authority for the husband, while they were accustomed to absolute patriarchy.
While blithly ignoring all aspects of the conversation that could only happen late at night in bed.
Rather, for the umpteenth time you deny the undeniable, and defend the indefensible. It makes you look like a State Department Spokeswoman.
The example of Boaz tells us that female consent is legally irrelevant at all times in all places, and male property rights over women must be respected at all times in all places.
The Navajo had a silly belief that mice are extremely unclean. Any object touched by a mouse had to be tossed in the fire. If you didn’t follow this rule, they said, evil spirits would enter your home and kill the able-bodied, while sparing babies and the elderly.
Science now believes this too, and calls it Hantavirus.
>The main context being that the events of the old testament, and the other laws and rules of the Old Testament reflect the kind of absolute patriarchy where a son could indeed be executed for disobedience
Not by his father. This was the Roman idea. But not the Jewish one. In order to execute a rebellious son, BOTH his father and his mother had to take him to the elders at the gate (the local court,) and testify against him, and the elders would pronounce the sentence. This is not patriarchy. And the son was equally obliged to obey his father and mother.
>where children were the property of their parents
No. Parents had rights over their children and obligations to them. For instance, they couldn’t sell their children into slavery (with the exception of a father selling his daughter to her future husband’s family, which had to release her with compensation if they decided not to marry their son to her.) They couldn’t kill their children. Etc.
>and women the property of men.
Again, no. A husband can’t sell his wife. Upon a man’s death, if he has no male children, his daughter inherits his property before his brother, and before his uncle. After a husband’s death, his widow is not “inherited,” unless 1) he left no children, 2) he has a surviving brother with whom they lived together. This is not how property works.
> Roman marriage was collapsing. With the cultural dominance of Rome, Jews were being tossed into a world strikingly similar in many ways to the modern world, a strong state, while they were accustomed to a state one step away from disorderly anarchy and marriage by consent with rapidly diminishing authority for the husband, while they were accustomed to absolute patriarchy.
This is absolutely no different from the state of things in late antiquity under the Greeks and Persians. And again, see the Elephantine Papyri. Absolute patriarchy never existed as a legal state of affairs.
>While blithly ignoring all aspects of the conversation that could only happen late at night in bed.
Again, untrue. You are unfamiliar with the sources. Which is fine-but why not get familiar before making pronouncements? The rabbis discussed every aspect of the Book of Ruth at length.
>The example of Boaz tells us that female consent is legally irrelevant at all times in all places, and male property rights over women must be respected at all times in all places.
The example of Boaz tells us that he publicly announced that he was acquiring Ruth for a wife (and not for a slave or a concubine), that he was acquiring her separately from the property of the deceased (“moreover”) and that he was acquiring her from herself (“acquired OF Ruth.”)
Further, the example of Boaz tells us that the property of Elimelech and his sons did not become the property of the nearest kinsman automatically, but was the property of Naomi after their deaths. What “male property rights over women” are there to talk about?
Finally, we have no known cases of a man acquiring a free woman for a wife despite her will, and there is no such case in any of the marriage documents we have in our possession, going back to the 6th century BCE.
You cannot do anything you like to a domestic animal, and still less to a pet, but they are property for all that.
Women could not consent, and children had to obey. There were limits, but that does not give exile Jews an excuse for radically changing those limits.
Like the state department spokeswoman, you stubbornly deny the undeniable.
Yet neither Naomi nor Ruth herself could give Ruth to Boaz. Ownership of Ruth was unclear, and Boaz proceeded to clarify it. But one thing is clear. Ruth did not own Ruth. Ruth does not tell Boaz she wants to become his property. She (optimistically) tells him that she already is his property – late at night, in bed with him, when he is half drunk.
There’s more to the traditions of ancient peoples than your BDSM fetish, Jim.
Peoples with reasonable fertility were reasonably patriarchal. Peoples that were not patriarchal failed to reproduce, and vanished from history.
And do people have to be *extremely* patriarchal to be *reasonably* patriarchal: what is a patriarchy where the father actually OWNS the women of the family if not the most extreme level of patriarchy?
I would classify the early Roman Republic as extreme patriarchy, because the patriarch could execute his wife or children at his entire discretion. On the other hand, the Roman Republic had marriage by consent. The wife had to publicly consent, once and forever, before witnesses, in a ceremony closely resembling Christian marriage.
On the other hand, with Old Testament patriarchy, there was no legal requirement for female consent, hence no wedding ceremony, but the patriarch could not execute his wife or children without cause, and he and his family had extensive obligations to look after his women. So I would classify that as moderate patriarchy. What B calls marriage was a contract to purchase the bride, sometimes with the husband purchasing the bride from the father, sometimes with the father purchasing another father’s daughter for his son.
Rape or seduction was a property crime against the father, husband, or betrothed. If the girl was not virgin and not betrothed, no significant property damage.
Exodus 21:
Note that if you have sex with a slavegirl, you have a legal obligation to continue to have sex with her – you can abandon her, but you cannot resell her, nor keep her as a slave and stop having sex with her in favor of another.
Exodus 22:
Deuteronomy 22:
>You cannot do anything you like to a domestic animal, and still less to a pet, but they are property for all that.
You can do anything you like to a domestic animal or a pet (except to have sex with them, eat them if they are not kosher, or treat them with gratuitous cruelty.) You can do many things with a slave, for instance, buy him, sell him, etc. You can’t do anything you like with a Jewish slave, who is more of an indentured servant, and you can’t do anything you like with your wife, to whom your obligations are very high. You can’t sell her, you can’t kill her, you can’t humiliate her, her obligations to you are limited (and actually somewhat less than your obligations to her, which are spelled out in the marriage contract.) If you divorce her, she gets the sum specified in the ketubah, not her father or brother. If you die, your children inherit your property, including animals and slaves, and if there are no children, your brother, and if no brother, your father or uncle-but they don’t inherit your wife.
>Women could not consent, and children had to obey.
The earliest contract records we have include women’s right to divorce on demand. Perhaps the Jews living in Elephantine in the 6th century BCE were less familiar with the Torah (which they lived by) than you are (you have, after all, skimmed some parts of the KJV translation online,) but the smart money says no.
>>While blithly ignoring all aspects of the conversation that could only happen late at night in bed.
Again, untrue. You are unfamiliar with the sources.
>Like the state department spokeswoman, you stubbornly deny the undeniable.
Deny what? You haven’t read the sources, so when you say “X is not discussed in there,” where it plainly is, and at length, you sound stupid.
>Yet neither Naomi nor Ruth herself could give Ruth to Boaz. Ownership of Ruth was unclear, and Boaz proceeded to clarify it.
Of course the ownership was clear. He acquired “OF” Ruth. Ruth was her own person.
>So I would classify that as moderate patriarchy. What B calls marriage was a contract to purchase the bride, sometimes with the husband purchasing the bride from the father, sometimes with the father purchasing another father’s daughter for his son.
We have no record of any ketubah (the marriage contract) where the bride is acquired from her father.
When a man would sell his minor daughter to another to be married to his son, that sale was not the marriage. The ketubah would happen afterwards.
Neither the groom nor the bride sign the ketubah, by the way. Nor does the bride’s father (the “giving away of the bride” is not a part of Jewish custom or religion.)
Women in first century Israel, at the time of Roman occupation, had no right to divorce. Nor did women in the time of the Pentateuch. Marriage by consent, and female divorce, are alien, and late, innovations.
I checked various Talmudic sources on the bedtime encounter of Ruth and Boaz. They are lying, as are you. And it is trivial to check this by comparing Ruth 3 and Ruth 4 with the sources that purport to describe Ruth.
Ruth asks Boaz to get on top of her and assume the position, but Boaz tells her he has to resolve who owns her before they can go that far.
If Ruth owned herself, or Naomi owned herself and Ruth, Boaz could get right on her. Boaz tells her that if he cannot make a deal with the nearer kinsman, it will be the nearer kinsman who gets on her.
Naomi does not own Elimelech’s land. Rather, his land owns her. The rightful inheritor of the plot has to apply it to support her, and impregnate Ruth with a son to inherit the land and take care of Ruth and Naomi in their old age, but neither she nor Ruth gets to decide who owns the land, and thus who owns Ruth, though doubtless they could make life a lot more fun for an owner of the land that they wanted, than an owner of the land that they did not want. But, want or not want, will get impregnated by the heir to the land.
Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah.
It is perfectly clear than in Old Testament Israel, and in Roman occupied Israel, women were not parties to the marital contract. If consulted, were consulted informally, like Ruth and Rebekah. Their consent was not legally required, was not formally given, nor formally witnessed.
include women’s right to divorce on demand
(◠‿◠)✌
>Women in first century Israel, at the time of Roman occupation, had no right to divorce. Nor did women in the time of the Pentateuch. Marriage by consent, and female divorce, are alien, and late, innovations.
The ketuboth (marriage contracts) we have from Elephantine, 6th century BCE, have explicit provisions for either party to terminate the marriage by public announcement.
>I checked various Talmudic sources on the bedtime encounter of Ruth and Boaz. They are lying, as are you. And it is trivial to check this by comparing Ruth 3 and Ruth 4 with the sources that purport to describe Ruth.
The rabbis of the Talmud knew the Book of Ruth in great detail, and could read Hebrew much better than you can (and than I can.) So when you accuse them of lying, you make yourself look stupid. “Plato, Aristotle-morons!”
As for me lying, GFY. When you say that the Sages ignored their late night meeting, when they actually discussed it at length, you reveal 1) ignorance, 2) arrogance.
>Naomi does not own Elimelech’s land. Rather, his land owns her.
Tell me again about convoluted Talmudic reasoning? Boaz says, “I’m buying everything that belonged to Elimelech and his sons from Naomi.” Obviously, she owns it.
>The rightful inheritor of the plot has to apply it to support her, and impregnate Ruth with a son to inherit the land and take care of Ruth and Naomi in their old age, but neither she nor Ruth gets to decide who owns the land, and thus who owns Ruth, though doubtless they could make life a lot more fun for an owner of the land that they wanted, than an owner of the land that they did not want.
The goel does not have to impregnate Ruth with a son. He only has to marry her. His obligation to support her doesn’t depend on whether there is a son or not. In fact, if he impregnates her, he loses his possession of the land (meaning, it becomes the land of the son upon maturity, as the son is considered the heir of the deceased.) If there is no child, then he inherits the land upon her death. We’ve been discussing this for a month, you should be able to understand by now. And the goel is not the inheritor of the land. He is its redeemer.
>>We have no record of any ketubah (the marriage contract) where the bride is acquired from her father.
>Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah.
We do not have their ketubah. We have a description of their marriage. The ketubah is the marriage contract, setting out the groom’s obligations and terms and conditions of the marriage.
If we did have their ketubah, it would be irrelevant, as they lived before the Torah was given.
>It is perfectly clear than in Old Testament Israel, and in Roman occupied Israel, women were not parties to the marital contract. If consulted, were consulted informally, like Ruth and Rebekah. Their consent was not legally required, was not formally given, nor formally witnessed.
What is perfectly clear to you is not perfectly clear to the Sages, or me, or anybody who has an acquaintance with the matter beyond a casual perusal of the KJV online. There is no source for someone marrying a woman against her will.
This tells us much about the laws of the Persians, little about the laws of the Jews.
If the Persians of that time had been reproducing, would not have recruited Jews into their army.
Well I know the book of Ruth in great detail, and the conversation it reports in chapter three as taking place in bed in the middle of the night between Ruth and Boaz sounds like the kind of conversation that is likely to take place between a man and a woman in bed together in the middle of the night, while the conversation reported in the Talmud sounds like a chat between talmudic scholars taking place a little after noon.
The writer of the book of Ruth cannot have actually known what Boaz and Ruth said when they spent the night together, but he depicted them acting as he believed that people of that era were likely to naturally behave, he depicted them acting naturalistically, acting as men and women act. In contrast, the talmudic accounts are neither true to the original, rewriting it in a more politically correct manner in a way that drastically changes the meaning of the characters and the nature of their deeds, nor true to life, in that the talmudic characters do not act like normal natural people.
>This tells us much about the laws of the Persians, little about the laws of the Jews.
This is a dishonest argument. If the sources don’t support your agenda, so much the worse for the sources. The Jews must have gotten these objectionable practices from the Persians! The fact is, those Jews had been living under the Persians for a couple of generations. Today’s Jews have lived under Christian/Muslim dominion for thousands of years, and still maintain distinctive practices. Therefore…
>If the Persians of that time had been reproducing, would not have recruited Jews into their army.
Not necessarily, and not relevant.
>Well I know the book of Ruth in great detail
It doesn’t show.
>, and the conversation it reports in chapter three as taking place in bed in the middle of the night between Ruth and Boaz sounds like the kind of conversation that is likely to take place between a man and a woman in bed together in the middle of the night, while the conversation reported in the Talmud sounds like a chat between talmudic scholars taking place a little after noon.
You are not reading the entirety of Talmudic discussions of the Book of Ruth.
>In contrast, the talmudic accounts are neither true to the original, rewriting it in a more politically correct manner in a way that drastically changes the meaning of the characters and the nature of their deeds, nor true to life, in that the talmudic characters do not act like normal natural people.
Normal natural people do not merit to have a Book written about them which is read almost 3 millennia later, nor to have their lineage survive that long, nor to produce a great line of kings, nor to produce builders of the Temple. The Sages knew how to read the plain text better than you do (since they read Hebrew, at the very least, and knew the context inside and out.) If they said there was more to it than the plain text, they had a reason.
Discussion with you is like attempting to hold a discussion with the State Department Spokeswoman. You deny the undeniable, and defend the indefensible.
The Old Testament, and the people it depicts, are deeply reactionary. Exile Jews have long been denial about this, and with the rise of the Cathedral, the level of denial has been rapidly escalating. Within historical times, the behavior of the Jews depicted in “Fiddler on the Roof” has become unthinkable.
This is amazing. Dirty bastard hippy Jesus and His followers abrogate the law by saying that there’s a new covenant, but Jesus comments that divorce had always been intended to be illegal.
Isaac’s marriage is not relevant to the law, because it was before the covenant.
What I get from this is that we have different conceptions of law. Jesus brings the Hellenistic concept of an eternal law of nature; the Church teaches that the sacrament of marriage is between the couple and thus a priest is not required for it to be valid. To the soulless Jew, law is what is written, and the question is how to use it to the advantage of the individual and the tribe. See every depiction of Jews ever.
I’m with you on cleanliness. But divorce is a deal-breaker, it is true that what comes out of a Ian’s mouth defiles him more than what goes in.
Anyway, just how common world-historically is women having a right of divorce?
Women having the right to divorce is highly abnormal, and usually presages the collapse of civilization.
@B:
Sorry for intruding into your argument with Jim, but I have a question:
It looks like Jewish identity used to be passed via father in ancient Israel. The Torah is full of “ben This” and “ben That.” Nowadays, Jewishness is considered to go via maternal line, at least in Ashkenazim.
My understanding that such transformation took place during Roman times. There is a brief discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineality_in_Judaism.
Any comment?
Additionally, there is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_a_Jew%3F#Tannaitic_Judaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_semper_certa_est
“The Jewish answer is to say, “we don’t know, but G-d does, so we need to make a constant good faith effort to understand his Law and to follow it regardless of whether we understand.†The first approach has, historically, led to a lot of consumption of fecal matter.”
American culture is wrong. Talmudic Jews don’t have a better sense of humour. They’re only more comfortable about chatting about excrement.
A.J.P.
It is pretty obvious that Jews are not making a constant good faith effort to understand his law and follow it. The Talmud interprets the Old Testament the way the Supreme Court interprets the constitution, reading black as white and up as down.
Talmudist A, around 200AD, rewrites a section of the Old Testament to say something completely different from what it originally said, often taking just a couple of lines as a hook on which to hang an entirely new story featuring characters with the same names, but entirely different characteristics and actions.
Talmudist B, around 300AD, rewrites Talmudist A to say something completely different from what he originally said, often taking a single line, or even a single word or phrase, as hook on which to hang …
Talmudist C, around 500 AD rewrites Talmudist B ….
And so it goes all the way to the twentieth century, like a game of telephone, getting more and more progressive all the way.
What the Jews do instead of following Old Testament law is take few minor irrelevancies from the Old Testament, double down on them, triple down on them, and quadruple down on them, while ignoring all the rest.
The Talmud is, in substantial part, poorly written fan fiction about characters with the same names as Old Testament characters.
Peppermint,
The law on divorce is presented in the Torah in some detail. I’m pretty sure that if it were not intended to be legal, it would not be in the Torah.
My personal opinion is that divorce on demand is fine, as long as it’s not incentivized. It’s not natural for a normal woman to aspire to be a divorcee, any more than it’s natural for a man to aspire to have his children raised by a woman living in a separate household. Proof of the latter lies in how much effort the West has to spend to incentivize divorce, not only by massive transfer payments to divorced women but also through giving them amazing legal powers over their ex-husbands vis restraining orders, custody arrangements, etc. And even with all this, it is necessary to pump massive amounts of propaganda at Western woman constantly to incentivize them to divorce-Sex in the City and the rest of that garbage.
Without the incentives and propaganda, what’s left? Maimonides says that for a woman to say of her husband “he repulses me” is sufficient grounds for divorce. What is gained by forcing such a woman to live with her husband?
Eli,
>It looks like Jewish identity used to be passed via father in ancient Israel.
No. Tribal identity was passed via the father. We have no indication that Hebrew identity was passed via the father. We have the erev rav, the mixed multitude, which came out of Egypt and did not belong to any of the tribes. Since a few decades earlier there had been a concerted effort to kill all male Jewish children, we can presume that this mixed multitude came from Jewish mothers and Egyptian fathers. In Leviticus 24, we see such a man, the son of a Jewish mother and a Egyptian father, executed for blasphemy.
>The Torah is full of “ben This†and “ben That.†Nowadays, Jewishness is considered to go via maternal line, at least in Ashkenazim.
You are “ben” (son of) your mother as well as your father. When a man is called up to the Torah, he is called by his patronymic name, when he is prayed for if he is sick, by his matronymic name. The male lineage determined tribal affiliation, kohanic or levitic status, etc.
>My understanding that such transformation took place during Roman times. There is a brief discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineality_in_Judaism.
We see in the Book of Ezra all the Jews who had married non-Jewish women being commanded to send them and their children away, in a very heartbreaking scene. The events there took place long before the Romans. In general, my comment is that the abandonment of the commandments by the Reform and Conservative Jews led to the inevitable outcome of assimilation and intermarriage. Now they are panicking and attempting to get out of the mess they got into by reinterpreting and abandoning more commandments and claiming that this is the way it always was. It’s impossible to sit on two chairs at the same time.
Jim,
I don’t understand your complaints. Are you saying that the rabbis who codified the Babylonian Talmud also rewrote the Jerusalem Talmud, codified a century earlier, and the codifiers of the Jerusalem Talmud rewrote the Mishna, and the codifiers of the Mishna rewrote the books written in the Babylonian exile, and the Jews living in the Babylonian exile rewrote the first five books of the Torah and those written by David, Samuel etc.? In that case, I have the following questions:
1) Why did these fabricators not simply rewrite the original works in such a way as to have their plain text just say whatever they wanted it to say?
2) How did they manage to take over the entire Jewish world (which included the Roman and Persian empires and a bit more) without any recorded complaints and without the prior, unaltered versions of the texts surviving? Jews are famously stubborn and contentious; you’d think the ones living in (for instance) Spain in the 5th century (for instance) would say “we don’t care what those guys in Persia say, we’re keeping our source texts, we know what the Torah and Mishna mean.” Where are the unaltered texts? Where are the Jewish dissidents?
3) OK, that was a trick question. We know of two sets of dissidents in our history, both saying the same thing: the rabbis are making things up contrary to the plain text. The first were the Saducees, about whom Josephus says that they were rich guys making stuff up for political power and that the stuff they made up was not accepted by the vast majority of Jews, who held that the Rabbis were, exactly as they said they were, the bearers of the tradition from Moshe. The second were the Karaites, who did not noticeably succeed and are down to a few hundred people. Neither groups produced any undistorted source texts to contradict what the Rabbis were saying.
4) I bring up the Elephantine Papyri as a source. That’s not serious enough for you-you refer me to Fiddler On The Roof. Next, could we discuss race relations in 19th century America using Django Unchained for a reference?
Perrick,
Mazal tov. Don’t forget to wash your hands.
If by “Torah” you mean old testament, only men can divorce women. A woman cannot divorce a man.
But, in fact, you are deceptively using the word “Torah” to include fan fiction made up in quite recent times.
Untrue
It is trivially obvious that Hebrew identity went by the father’s identity. The sons of priests are priests. Does not matter who the mother was. Lineage to Abraham, and lineage to Israel, is traced in the male line. A Hebrew is descended from one of the sons of Israel, not one of the daughters. When someone takes a woman captive in war, there is no requirement that she convert.
When I said “rewrote” I used misleading words. I meant by “rewrote”, “produced a new version incompatible with the original”
I am saying that each generation of Talmudists wrote stuff that is flagrantly inconsistent with the old testament, and flagrantly inconsistent with the writings of the previous generation of talmudists. As I said “badly written fan fiction”, where “characters have the names but not the personalities or conduct of old testament characters”, that characters with old testament names are depicted by each talmudist as acting like his contemporaries, and speaking and thinking like the talmudists of his own time, that the Talmud is a great big pile of replacements for the Old Testament, each replacement incompatible with the Old Testament and with each of the others.
>If by “Torah†you mean old testament, only men can divorce women. A woman cannot divorce a man.
“Torah” means “instruction.” In this case, I mean the written Torah, which has details on divorce, suggesting that, contra Jesus, it didn’t see divorce as something impossible or forbidden, which was Peppermint’s question.
>It is trivially obvious that Hebrew identity went by the father’s identity. The sons of priests are priests. Does not matter who the mother was.
First, priestly (kohanic) lineage is a specific example of tribal lineage, which is patrilineal, but national lineage is matrilineal. Second, it still matters who the mother was-the son of a priest and a woman forbidden to him (such as a divorcee) is not a priest.
>A Hebrew is descended from one of the sons of Israel, not one of the daughters.
Nope. Daughter of Israel, or converted women. Hence the mixed multitude.
>When someone takes a woman captive in war, there is no requirement that she convert.
If she does not choose to convert within 12 months, she is not considered Jewish but a resident alien, and her children are not Jewish.
>When I said “rewrote†I used misleading words. I meant by “rewroteâ€, “produced a new version incompatible with the originalâ€
In which case, my original questions still stand. Given that the Jews were universally literate, geographically dispersed and famously stubborn and stiff-necked, given that there was no Jewish pope or Jewish Roman Empire to enforce every new version’s acceptance as it came out, why would all the Jews accept these constant incompatible updates over and over again? And why, in these updates, did the Talmudists record their opinions which disagreed with each other, with Talmudists of previous generations, with each other other but in agreement with Talmudists of previous generations, etc.?
If your objection is that in some places, the Sages seem to put words into the mouths of Torah personages, then I can tell you that their exegesis is often not meant to be taken literally as meaning “X said Y in Z place and time.” They are obviously using a certain situation or passage as a hook to hang an idea on. Maimonides says this explicitly in the Guide to the Perplexed. The difference between reading with context and in good faith and reading with no context in bad faith is described very beautifully and succinctly by him also in his introduction to Perek Helek, here, to which I have nothing to add: https://www.mhcny.org/qt/1005.pdf
Did the twelve sons of Israel marry the daughters of Israel? I don’t think so.
You are hanging a large and improbable fan fiction on this phrase. Which fan fiction makes no sense.
More fan fiction.
Deuteronomy 21:
Obviously, still his wife, whether she converts or not, and obviously no issues of the nationality arise, because if they did, the law would have to address her conversion or the conversion of her children. She becomes a Hebrew by abduction, and a member of her master’s tribe by abduction, like it or not, conversion or not. She is as Hebrew as anyone, even though kicking and screaming in protest against it all her days.
Nehemiah worries about the children of foreign women being raised as non Hebrews, in particular, that one of the sons of the high priest is the son in law of a powerful foreigner. However, a captive, whose kin have fled or been killed, is less likely to cause this problem, and so, unsurprisingly, we nowhere see in the Old Testament anyone worrying about this problem in relation to captive women. Deuteronomy on captive women is incompatible with Nehemiah on free women, and the simplest explanation of this inconsistency is that free women with powerful foreign kin caused the problems of which Nehemiah complains and captive women whose kin were dead or fled did not.
Nehemiah’s complaint only makes sense if nationality follows the father, not the mother. He is worried about the children of foreign women being deemed Jews because they have Jewish fathers, but not being raised as Jews. This suggests that patriarchy in Nehemiah’s time was much weaker than patriarchy in the time of Judges, which is an alternative explanation for why Nehemiah’s rules differ from Deuteronomy’s rules. But the simplest and most obvious explanation is that Deuteronomy addresses captives, and Nehemiah does not address captives.
>Did the twelve sons of Israel marry the daughters of Israel? I don’t think so.
There is a midrash (exegetic text) that says they had twin sisters whom they married, but the conventional view is that the family of Israel became a nation in Israel, and that the Exodus was like iron being drawn from a furnace, or a shepherd delivering a lamb from a sheep. So while we know that for instance Judah’s line came in large part from Tamar, a Canaanite, and Menashe and Efraim from Asenath the daughter of Potiphera, the Chief Executioner of Egypt, it is irrelevant. By the time that we left Egypt, we were a distinct nation, with patrilineal tribal affiliation and matrilineal national affiliation.
>You are hanging a large and improbable fan fiction on this phrase. Which fan fiction makes no sense.
Strange then that it was accepted by all Jews worldwide without any significant dissent. You are dancing around my questions, avoiding them.
>More fan fiction.
It’s what Maimonides says. You are more familiar with the Torah then he was? I mean, come on.
The details of her obligations and status are not spelled out explicitly in the Written Torah, but they are in the Oral Torah.
>Obviously, still his wife, whether she converts or not,
“Obviously” is not an argument.
Aside from “wife,” the mother of a man’s children can have another legal status. For instance, she can be a concubine (“pilegesh”) or a Canaanite slave given to a Hebrew slave to produce children (who, incidentally, explicitly inherit their mother’s status.)
What is the status of a yefat toar, a captive woman? The written Torah doesn’t say.
>and obviously no issues of the nationality arise, because if they did, the law would have to address her conversion or the conversion of her children.
The Written Law is not comprehensive, the Oral Law is, and addresses her conversion.
>She becomes a Hebrew by abduction, and a member of her master’s tribe by abduction, like it or not, conversion or not. She is as Hebrew as anyone, even though kicking and screaming in protest against it all her days.
Untrue. We don’t have forced conversion. She is forced to accept the status of a ger toshav (resident alien, subject to the 7 Noahide Commandments) if she doesn’t wish to convert to Judaism within 12 months.
>Nehemiah worries about the children of foreign women being raised as non Hebrews, in particular, that one of the sons of the high priest is the son in law of a powerful foreigner.
Irrelevant what he worries about. If the law was that Hebrew status was patrilineal, he would have had no legal standing to have the children sent away, and the Jews would have told him to pound sand, and in the case that he persisted would have gone and complained to the Persians. Their compliance tells us they knew he was in the right and they were wrong.
When was it accepted? It was accepted some time after 1200 AD, possibly a very long time after 1200 AD. This is a piss poor indication of what Jews believed in 30AD, let alone what Hebrews believed in 1300 BC.
No it is not what Maimonides says. Maimonides does a fan fiction on Exodus in 1200 AD, and then someone else does a fan fiction on Maimonides’ Exodus, and after numerous reimaginings of Exodus by numerous rabbis, it eventually becomes your version of Exodus.
>When was it accepted? It was accepted some time after 1200 AD, possibly a very long time after 1200 AD.
When was what accepted, matrilineal descent in Judaism? It’s always been the case since there’s been a Hebrew nation as such. You are attempting to make the case that it has not always been the case, to which I say that if this is so, there would have been a worldwide controversy as this radically new standard was imposed (and this goes for the rest of the places where you claim rabbinical Judaism is a substitution for the Torah vs. an explication of how it’s practiced.) There would have been many communities which did not accept this radical change, there would have been public debates, and all this would have left some record in history. We have no such record.
>This is a piss poor indication of what Jews believed in 30AD, let alone what Hebrews believed in 1300 BC.
The best indications of what Jews believed then are our traditions. We also have documents from 1300 BCE, 650 BCE and 30 CE, which don’t indicate patrilineal nationality inheritance.
>No it is not what Maimonides says.
Oh? Perhaps in your extensive studies of Maimonides, you have encountered a different, esoteric source text. In the Jewish source text of Maimonides’ Mishne Torah, he says:
“Her captor must be patient with her for twelve months if she refuses to convert.
If she still refuses after this interval has passed, she must agree to accept the seven universal laws commanded to Noah’s descendants and then, she is set free. Her status is the same as all other resident aliens.
Her captor may not marry her, for it is forbidden to marry a woman who has not converted.”
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1188353/jewish/Melachim-uMilchamot-Chapter-8.htm
>Maimonides does a fan fiction on Exodus in 1200 AD, and then someone else does a fan fiction on Maimonides’ Exodus, and after numerous reimaginings of Exodus by numerous rabbis, it eventually becomes your version of Exodus.
What is “Maimonides’ Exodus”? I’m not familiar with such a book. Is this part of your new religion?
In my Mishne Torah, it says that a Jew is forbidden to marry a woman who has not converted. It also says this in the Mishna, the Talmud and every other Jewish source I’ve seen, right back to the Torah: “neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.” I have not seen any Jewish source which says that you can marry non-Jews under any circumstances whatsoever, or that forced conversion is valid. Since I have Jewish sources ranging over 3000+ years at my disposal, I’m forced to admit there’s something to this.
Your story about the mixed multitude, which is based on a story based on a story based on story that first appeared in 1200AD.
Herod’s father was a Jew, Herod’s mother was not a Jew, yet Herod was a Jew. No conversion required. Herod’s paternal ancestors were suspect because of swordpoint conversion. No one seems to have worried much about his unconverted mother. Therefore, patrilineal descent from Old Testament times to New Testament times. Deuteronomy 25:5-10 presupposes that Hebrew nationality is patrilineal, or equivalently that a captive woman becomes Hebrew by abduction. Nehemiah complains about Jews who, being raised by their non Jewish mothers, fail to identify with Jewish culture, implying patrilineality in Nehemiah’s time.
That is Maimonides fan fiction, from around 1200 AD
I refer to your interpretation of “the mixed multitude”, which is not Maimonides fan fiction, but a fan fiction of his fan fiction, coming from a considerably later time.
Everything in your Torah contradicts everything else in your Torah, because it is an accumulation of twenty different and entirely incompatible Torahs, as Jewish culture drifted twenty times over the centuries from four hundred AD to the present. In particular your Mishne Torah contradicts Deuteronomy 25:5-10, where the only concern of the lawmaker is to make certain the paternity of any possible children conceived by the captive.
I don’t think you do. Your documents from 1300 BCE are the pentateuch, which unambiguously indicates patrilineal nationality inheritance.
In fact there is no indication of any subgroup of Jews following matrilineal nationality inheritance until after the exile.
“And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month:”
A full month eh?
I wonder why a full month of isolation of a fertile woman who isn’t coming from a family who vouches for her is significant.
You imply whoever made this law, wanted certainty of paternity, something that war is apt to render uncertain.
The same is true of the Old Testament laws in general. They ensure certainty of paternity, prohibit the common Egyptian practice of infanticide, and require strict patriarchy, all of which would have brought Hebrew fertility well above Egyptian levels. According to the Pentateuch, the twelve sons of Israel produced six hundred thousand adult males four hundred and thirty years later, which corresponds to a high, but not at all miraculous, growth rate of 2.5% per year.
>I wonder why a full month of isolation of a fertile woman who isn’t coming from a family who vouches for her is significant.
A reasonable guess. The situation is as follows: the captor has relations with her once at first, and then she keeps 30 days of mourning. She can convert immediately or within 12 months, and he can only marry her after the conversion (and after 3 months have passed from her captivity.) If she conceives from the first incident (or was already pregnant,) the child has the status of a convert and is not legally considered the captor’s son (because she was not Jewish at the time of conception.) The court is legally responsible for him (though presumably the facts on the ground look different.)
There are other interesting details-he can’t have relationswith her more than once initially, he can only capture one woman under this law, etc.
The details of what I described above are as follows (same link to the Mishne Torah):
What is the procedure which a Jew must follow regarding a yefat toar after he had relations with her once while she is still a gentile? If she desires to enter under the wings of the Shechinah, he may have her immersed in a mikveh for the purpose of conversion immediately.
If she does not accept the Jewish faith, she should dwell in his house for thirty days, as ibid. 21:13 states: ‘She shall mourn her father and mother for thirty days.’ Similarly, she should mourn the abandonment of her faith. Her captor should not prevent her from crying.
She must let her nails grow and shave her head so that she will not appear attractive to him. She must be together with him at home. Thus, when he enters, he sees her; when he leaves; he sees her, so that he becomes disgusted with her.
He must be patient with her so that she will accept the Jewish faith. If she accepts Judaism and he desires her, she may convert and immerse herself in the mikveh for that purpose, like other converts.
Halacha 6
A captor must wait three months before marrying his captive: the month of mourning and two months following it.
When he marries her, he must give her Kiddushin and a Ketubah. If he does not desire her, he must set her free. If he sells her, he violates a negative commandment, as Deuteronomy 21:14 states: ‘You may not sell her for money.’ Should a captor sell his captive, the sale is invalidated and he must return the money.
Similarly, if after having relations with her, he forces her to become a servant, he violates a negative commandment from the time he makes use of her as ibid. states: lo titamar boh. That phrase means ‘he should not make use of her.’
Halacha 7
Her captor must be patient with her for twelve months if she refuses to convert.
If she still refuses after this interval has passed, she must agree to accept the seven universal laws commanded to Noah’s descendants and then, she is set free. Her status is the same as all other resident aliens.
Her captor may not marry her, for it is forbidden to marry a woman who has not converted.
Halacha 8
If she conceives after the initial relations with her captor, the child has the status of a convert. In no regard is he considered as the captor’s son, for his mother is a gentile. Rather, the court immerses him in the mikveh and takes responsibility for him.
Raised by wolves, were you?
If the captor screws her immediately, and she becomes pregnant immediately, he will not know if he is the father of the child, which creates problems for himself, the child, and the nation of Israel. No gene tests back then. She might have been pregnant before he abducted her. So the captor should hold off for a month, in order that the land of Israel shall be populated by the biological children of the patriarch Israel in the male line, and so that the nation of Israel has strong patriarchal families, so that he will have motive to raise and protect the child in his own culture.
Otherwise, if she becomes pregnant immediately, he will be strongly tempted to dump her and her child, because of uncertainty of paternity resulting from the fog of war.
It is one of the numerous laws that are clearly intended to promote strong patriarchal families and prevent female headed families. War and rape tends to create female headed families because of uncertainty of paternity.
About the captive woman joining her master’s tribe kicking and screaming all the time…I thought Jim that your position was that women enjoy being controlled by powerful and domineering men. “Kicking and screaming all the time” doesn’t sound like the woman is enjoying it…
The context was that she was kicking and screaming in objection to religious conversion and cultural assimilation, not sex.
>Raised by wolves, were you?
Master Yoda, is that you? I may have been raised by wolves, but I don’t have any pedophile friends, nor do I write treatises on the sexuality of 10 year old girls. People who live in glass houses…
>If the captor screws her immediately, and she becomes pregnant immediately, he will not know if he is the father of the child, which creates problems for himself, the child, and the nation of Israel.
Irrelevant. The way one acquires a yefat toar is by having relations with her more or less immediately the first time. If she gets pregnant or was pregnant already, it’s irrelevant-the child is legally not his but a convert. If you took her home and didn’t have relations with her, she doesn’t fall under this category-she may be a slave, whom you can set free and then marry, or something else, but she is not under this law.
The entire point of the law is that men in a war are aroused (it’s a stimulating experience, until you hit burnout) and if you forbid the enemy’s women to them outright, they will violate the law. This is similar to the logic behind the sacrifices, which were instituted to give people who couldn’t fathom another way of connecting with a deity an outlet, so they wouldn’t go and sacrifice to other gods. Therefore, the Torah permits captive women with extensive restrictions (only one per, only once per, you have to bring her home beforehand.) Then, since the Torah doesn’t smile upon this kind of marriage but only offers it as a concession to human flaws, it enacts restrictions designed to disincentivize the man (the woman has to shave her head and sit in his home mourning, reducing her attractiveness) and the woman (all she has to do is refuse conversion for a year and she is free to go, and he can’t have relations with her in the interim.)
I will not argue with you about what the Torah should say, what it should mean, what it would mean and say if you wrote it or were set in charge of interpreting it. I know what the Written Torah actually says and what the Oral Torah says it means. I also know the track record of those who threw out the Oral Torah and decided that they were better fit to interpret the Written-though they were much better versed in it than you (being literate in Hebrew and knowing the source text by heart, for starters, as well as being acquainted with what they were rejecting closely,) this path led them straight into extinction. We should follow them, because we surely know better? Thanks but I’ll pass.
Clearly raised by wolves.
That is not what the law says. The law is not to remedy rape, but to acquire a wife. Look at the preamble. No rape mentioned or implied.
The law on rape, Deuteronomy 22:22-29 is that rape is a property crime. If, for example, you rape a non virgin who is not someone’s wife, no big deal. Obviously property crimes are permitted against enemy property. So rape is OK. It is just that forming a family on that basis requires a gentler touch.
Recall the problems that the Mongols suffered as a result of too casually marrying large numbers of Muslim and Chinese women. Raping the enemy does not threaten social cohesion, it strengthens it. Marrying the enemy is apt to undermine social cohesion, as the Mongols discovered to their great cost.
So after you have done with raping killing looting and burning, you think maybe one of these chicks would be a good wife. Well, the law, Deuteronomy 21:10-14 says you have to hold your horses a bit for the sake of family peace and paternal certainty.
>>The context was that she was kicking and screaming in objection to religious conversion and cultural assimilation, not sex.
And I thought your whole point is that it’s wonderful when women have sex with partners decided by others with terms and conditions imposed by those same others. Which would occur to the highest degree possible in the situation we are discussing.
>Clearly raised by wolves.
Why, because I know the law? I’m not making this up-every halakhic source will tell you the same thing (including Maimonides.) The child of a Jew and a non-Jew is not legally considered as the Jew’s child. Obviously, their relationship will be different in reality than in legal theory.
>That is not what the law says. The law is not to remedy rape, but to acquire a wife. Look at the preamble. No rape mentioned or implied.
The law says, when you are at war and see a woman you want, this is the only way you can have relations with her. If the Torah was primarily motivated by social Darwinism, sure, it would say what you want it to say and mean what you want it to mean. But it doesn’t. And if you wanted to ensure a supply of wives for warriors from the captive population, you wouldn’t need this law-there is already a set of laws for slavery which includes provisions for freeing a slave to marry her.
As for your fictions about rape being no big deal, the Torah compares a woman who is raped to someone who is murdered. We are not wolves.
No that is not what the law says.
What the laws says is:
It is highly likely that a soldier in the victorious army frequently seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast desire unto her, but not that he wouldest have her to his wife.
What the law says is not that this is the only way that you can fuck her, but that this is the only way you can bring her home to Israel.
Thereby avoiding the problems the Mongols suffered.
The penalty for rape is generally the same as the penalty for seduction. And, in the case of virgin not betrothed, not very severe.
As for single non virgins: God will punish you, but men will not.
Further, the law Deuteronomy 21:10-14 simply does not say “after you rape her, then you have to marry her”. It says if you want to marry her, then not allowed to rape her till sufficient time has passed that it is clear she is not already pregnant with someone else’s seed.
(Because probably all the hot captives had been raped multiple times)
>Herod’s father was a Jew, Herod’s mother was not a Jew, yet Herod was a Jew. No conversion required.
Herod’s father, Antipater, was an Edomite, an Idumean, as was his mother. At least, according to one point of view. This would mean that their ancestors’ conversion was invalid, being coerced, which makes him not Jewish. According to the Talmud, Herod was not a Jew but a Canaanite slave of the house of the Hashmoneans. He was also a vile individual who murdered many rabbis and is considered a villain in our history. So not the best example.
> Deuteronomy 25:5-10 presupposes that Hebrew nationality is patrilineal, or equivalently that a captive woman becomes Hebrew by abduction.
No, it doesn’t. It presupposes that for a man to marry a captive, she must convert. We are explicitly prohibited from intermarrying with non-Jews (not converts.)
>Nehemiah complains about Jews who, being raised by their non Jewish mothers, fail to identify with Jewish culture, implying patrilineality in Nehemiah’s time.
You are standing Ezra (not Nehemia) on his head (and I suspect you have not read the book). He complains about the improper behavior of Jews in marrying non-Jewish women*, and tells them to send away their non-Jewish wives and children. Again, if the children were Jewish, he would not do this, and they would not have listened to him. He would have done the same thing
>That is Maimonides fan fiction, from around 1200 AD
Yes, Maimonides is fan fiction, the Talmud is fan fiction, the Mishna is fan fiction and only you know what the Torah means. Likewise, Aristotle is fan fiction on Plato, Plato is fan fiction on Socrates, who is fan fiction on Thales, and only you know what Thales meant. Gather around, all you nations of the world, Jim will teach you what your scriptures and traditions really mean.
>I refer to your interpretation of “the mixed multitudeâ€, which is not Maimonides fan fiction, but a fan fiction of his fan fiction, coming from a considerably later time.
This is not true. Sources considerably prior to Maimonides debate whether the mixed multitude are intermixed with Hebrews (meaning, children of Hebrew mothers and Egyptian fathers) or Egyptian converts or what.
>Everything in your Torah contradicts everything else in your Torah, because it is an accumulation of twenty different and entirely incompatible Torahs, as Jewish culture drifted twenty times over the centuries from four hundred AD to the present.
Strangely, the documents we have don’t show this. The people writing in the 6th century BCE, 1st century CE, 3rd century CE, and so on until today seem to think that there is one Torah and one tradition which is internally consistent. When they disagree with something a previous codifier says, they state this explicitly.
>In particular your Mishne Torah contradicts Deuteronomy 25:5-10, where the only concern of the lawmaker is to make certain the paternity of any possible children conceived by the captive.
The lawmaker is G-d. If you claim to know G-d’s purpose in giving any specific commandment, you are in disagreement with his Torah: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the LORD.” If Maimonides, writing about a commandment, says that it means X, and you say it means Y, whom should I trust? Obviously, Maimonides-he is a subject expert, who dedicated his whole life to Torah study, and a world class philosopher, whose integrity shines through his writings (and by the way, when he doesn’t know what something means, he says it, as do all the other rabbis whose works I’ve read.) You, on the other hand, have a very shallow grasp of a Googled translation of the source material, and when you don’t know something, you just make it up and hope nobody calls you out.
>The penalty for rape is generally the same as the penalty for seduction. And, in the case of virgin not betrothed, not very severe.
The penalty for rape goes on top of the other penalties for assault, and is quite severe-50 shekels of silver, a shekel being about 10 grams, so half a kilo of silver. The penalty for seduction is brideprice and forced marriage.
>As for single non virgins: God will punish you, but men will not.
This is the same as the case, for instance, for a man who is assaulted and robbed or killed with no witnesses (meaning, without two adult male Jews who keep the Torah). The Torah has no explicit provision for punishing these people through the system of religious courts, reserving this for the king and his representatives.
>(Because probably all the hot captives had been raped multiple times)
You have us confused with Arabs or Mongols or something. It is forbidden to rape captives except in this specific case. Hence, you won’t find mass rape described in the many wars described in the Torah, or any rape of captives for that matter. And this is how it has been since. For instance, here are leftists complaining that we don’t rape Arab women in Yehuda and Shomron and Gaza because we are racist and don’t see them as human: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124674
* “Now when these things were done, the princes drew near unto me, saying: ‘The people of Israel, and the priests and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken of their daughters for themselves and for their sons; so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the peoples of the lands; yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath been first in this faithlessness.’.. And at the evening offering I arose up from my fasting, even with my garment and my mantle rent; and I fell upon my knees, and spread out my hands unto the LORD my God; and I said: ‘O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to Thee, my God; for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our guiltiness is grown up unto the heavens…And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken Thy commandments, which Thou hast commanded by Thy servants the prophets, saying: The land, unto which ye go to possess it, is an unclean land through the uncleanness of the peoples of the lands, through their abominations, wherewith they have filled it from one end to another with their filthiness. Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons, neither take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek their peace or their prosperity for ever; that ye may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever. And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for our great guilt, seeing that Thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such a remnant, shall we again break Thy commandments, and make marriages with the peoples that do these abominations? wouldest not Thou be angry with us till Thou hadst consumed us, so that there should be no remnant, nor any to escape?”…”Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin gathered themselves together unto Jerusalem within the three days; it was the ninth month, on the twentieth day of the month; and all the people sat in the broad place before the house of God, trembling because of this matter, and for the great rain. And Ezra the priest stood up, and said unto them: ‘Ye have broken faith, and have married foreign women, to increase the guilt of Israel. Now therefore make confession unto the LORD, the God of your fathers, and do His pleasure; and separate yourselves from the peoples of the land, and from the foreign women.’Then all the congregation answered and said with a loud voice: ‘As thou hast said, so it is for us to do.”
Ah, Nazis. Classy as ever. The Bible says that those who bless us will be blessed, and those who curse us will be cursed.
The Hamas guys are our enemies, not our errant subjects. They don’t need indicting. They need killing, and their families need deporting (with the confiscation of all property.)
Israel’s Supreme Court is worse than that of the US, because it takes its lead from the US one, occasionally running ahead of it.
On checking the linked site, I find that Nazis are not only socialists, they are, worse than that, feminists.
Explains the failure of Hitler to fix the Weimar fertility problem.
Golden Dawn is the same way. They want to be Greek orthodox, they want to have a strong social safety net for Greeks, they want to have women in roles, and I guess we’re just hoping for them to take power and see if they can reestablish Constantine II the way Franco did with John Charles.
Nominal matrilineality is a good adaptation to being surrounded by foreigners. A man takes a goyische wife, and if his son by her takes a Jew wife, which is difficult because he is not a Jew, then their children are Jews with 75% Jew blood and sufficiently useful features to convince two Jews to reproduce with them, and their Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA is pure Jewish. If a goy takes a Jew wife, presumably he raises his children by her not to be part of the Jewish community.
DNA percentages are irrelevant. The children of a Jewish man by a non-Jewish wife (not a convert) are not Jewish. Regardless of percentages. Someone whose ancestors are Jewish except for his matrilineal grandmother’s mother is not Jewish. (Observant) Jews will not intermarry with them, they are not treated as Jews (unless they convert.) And if a non-Jewish man has a Jewish wife, their children are Jewish, and if the children are female, their grandchildren are Jewish, etc. We don’t care who was raised how, in what community, or what features they have. That’s a non-Jewish way of looking at your people. We don’t extend membership based on DNA analysis or skull measurements.
Obviously not the Old Testament rule, where tribal membership, such as membership of the tribe of Judah, followed the male line.
For the eighth time, tribal membership and national affiliation are different.
Hey Jim, do you crack a whip on your wife’s hinney or is your macho talk online compensation for being pussywhipped?
Are you capable of thinking abstractly about human affairs or must everything an individual says reflect his life circumstances according to your interpretation of human nature? This kind of excuse to miss the point is the worst form of ad hominem.
Jim is free to have his own opinion but when he shouts at B–the resident expert on Judaism–that Old Testament Jews owned their wives, no matter how ab refutes him and when he says that it’s actually fortunate that women have not had the accomplishments to be worthy of being poster girls–all of that betrays the fact that his opinion is not just an abstract, intellectual opinion but rather a “fact” that he needs to be true on a deep emotional level, above and beyond any abstract, intellectual capability to reason with. If there was a training regimen or some sort of technology (whether a metal exoskeleton, a genetic modification or some other thing) that allowed the average girl to fight and work at the average guy’s level, to the point where even he would have to admit the truth of it, then I’m sure he would be literally humiliated and traumatized that such a measurement of his own value (by means of comparison) had been toppled once and for all!
Just because technology allows it, doesn’t mean it must be created a moral imperative out of it. So genetically modified women is now equal to men yay! They already exist nominally and it’s called trannies beating the shit out of genetically normal women.
Gays keep struggling with STD’s even tough there is supposed to exist preemptive methods. So much for a technology allowed moral imperative.
You guys are the ones who make your preferences for women into moral imperatives. I say women should do what they want to do and can do as long as it adheres to the non-aggression principle.
People want to reproduce. Cannot reproduce without a binding contract. The nature of men and women being what it is, hard to make that contract bind except in a patriarchal society.
— I say women should do what they want to do and can do as long as it adheres to the non-aggression principle.
Fine. First tear down the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so I don’t need to have female “coworkers”. Also tear down the no-fault divorce law so women can’t break their contracts unilaterally (non-aggression principle?).
Also, defining aggression requires tort law, which requires a legislature and a judiciary.
Yes peppermint because women never worked for wages before 1964…
>>People cannot reproduce without a binding contract
That’s why the underclass produces a higher number of children per woman than the rest of America in spite of also having more abortions per woman than the rest of America.
Their husband is Uncle Sam the Big Pimp
In fact, non-aggression is an empty rhetorical trick, in which people hear words that are meaningless are Satan whispers meaningful things into their ears. To me, when I hear it, Satan whispers that it’s an empty rhetorical trick designed to destroy the government so that men can impose something decent, Wild West style. To you, Satan whispers that the notion of justice hat is obvious to you will be imposed under the non-aggression principle, imposed by the legislature, judiciary, and executive that are needed to enforce it.
If we have non-aggression, it obviously implies that women have no right to sue businesses for not hiring them or for not promoting them or for not giving them easy jobs, and that women have no right to alter their marriage contract unilaterally to give them alimony and take away the kids and take child support that is meant for the kids.
To you, non-aggression means that women have all those rights, because women need enough rights so they will be equal to men.
When did I ever say that I interpreted women’s rights in the way you described them? I don’t support affirmative action but I see no need to elaborate further since no matter what I say, you guys will rant about how I am a Marxist just as no matter what B says, you guys will say that he the pious Jew does not understand Judaism and its traditions as you guys do.
Even though there are similarities between the relations of Uncle Sam and welfare clients is similar to the traditional relationship of husbands and wives, there isn’t anything near as orderly in the regulations between how Uncle Sam relates to his welfare clients. Everything in American politics is negotiable, even if much of the negotiations are directed by the major players towards the question of how far left America will go. But then again Orwell did characterize the regime in 1984 as oligarchical collectivism so if the major powers in American politics are inclined towards oligarchical collectivism, then a shift to the left is inevitable…
You can simply check the old testament, to ascertain which of us is telling the truth about it.
Women are legally property: See the laws Exodus 21:7-9, Exodus 22:14-17, Deuteronomy 22:13-29, Deuteronomy 25:5-10
There is no Jewish wedding ceremony involving formal witnessing of female consent. Today’s Jewish wedding ceremony is inherited from the Christians, who inherited it from the Romans.
Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah is a contract between Rebekah’s father Bethuel and Isaac’s father Abraham. Isaac does not get any say in it. Rebekah has no formal say in it. Genesis Chapter 24. Rebekah was property of Bethuel, became property of Abraham. Compare Exodus 21:7-9
Similarly Genesis 30, where women are traded like cattle, and indeed for cattle.
Marriage of Ruth and Boaz. Ruth chapters 3 and 4. Ruth, in bed with the half drunk Boaz, tells Boaz she is already his property and he should use her accordingly. Boaz says he has to negotiate with the nearer heir to Elimelech.
Should the nearer heir to Elimelech insist on his rights, Ruth will have to sleep with him instead of Boaz. Ruth cannot give herself to Boaz, nor can Naomi give Ruth to Boaz. Only the nearer heir to Elimelech.
And should you start reading the Talmud, you will find it contains large amounts of badly written fan fiction about characters with old testament names, who, however, frequently act and speak out of character with the originals, having a striking tendency to act like people of the talmudist’s own time, and to speak and think like talmudists. As the times of the Talmudists become more progressive, so does their fan fiction.
The whole point of the Book of Ruth is that a Jewish clan’s goyische kin can be full members of the clan if they embrace the clan religion wholeheartedly. This goes against the idea that Ruth was some sort of captive dragged into the family of Boaz for if a convert did not convert with all her heart, then the Torah forbidding intermarriage “lest they turn their hearts away from Me” would most certainly apply.
You claim to know exactly what the Book of Ruth means, and that it was never intended to mean anything about marriage.
That makes it *better* for Jim’s purposes of establishing what marriage was like at the time it was written, since people usually write minor details in their stories in a manner that makes sense to them.
Quite so. As I said, it is unlikely that the writer knew what Ruth and Boaz said when they spent the night together, but he knew what a man and woman might realistically say under those circumstances.
The story of Ruth, inadvertently and in passing, shows that Deuteronomy 25:5-10 says what it means, and means what it says. Naomi is owned by her deceased husband’s land, rather than owning her deceased husband’s land, thus similarly the land owns Ruth.
That is not the topic of Ruth. That is the topic of Deuteronomy 25:5-10
The words attributed to Ruth and Boaz only make sense if Ruth is arguing that she is property, not arguing that she wants to make a deal with Boaz where she is obligated to sleep with him, and he obligated to sleep with her and to support her, but rather arguing that she is already obligated to sleep with him, and he already obligated to sleep with her, and to support her.
Indeed, the proposition that she is a chaste and virtuous women, when she has washed and anointed her body and snuck into the bed of the half drunk Boaz, only makes sense if she, and he, are socially and legally obligated to have sex. Boaz endorses her virtue, but then says her ownership is less clear than she claims. She does not say she is giving herself to Boaz, but that she already belongs to him, and Boaz says she does not necessarily belong to him, which implies she cannot give herself to him, because she does not own herself. Ruth’s argument to Boaz that Boaz already owns her, and they are socially and legally obligated to have sex, and Boaz’s reply that maybe someone else owns her, is based on Deuteronomy 25:5-10
Note that despite Boaz worrying that someone else owns her, they spend the entire night in bed together, and only in the morning does Boaz take action on the problem – not that that is all that relevant to Old Testament marriage, but it is relevant that the old testament Ruth and Boaz, unlike the Talmudic Ruth and Boaz, act like a man and a woman, rather than two talmudic sages.
Jim: Ruth was coerced into a relationship with Boaz but her story illustrates a wholehearted conversion to Judaism.
Normal People: Makes sense.
I get too bored with you lying about what I said to bother refuting you.
Can you point to any *deliberate* deception I have said about your views? If I make a mistake in saying which of two far-out, strange fringe views you have, the difference between the one I say you have and the one you actually have is as irrelevant to outsiders as the difference in views during the filioque controversy or the difference in views between the Chalcedonian and Oriental Orthodox views are to outside observers.
From time to time you assert that I have said something stupid or evil. Sometimes the claim bears some resemblance to my words. Sometimes I can see no resemblance. Where I see a slight resemblance, I will politely restate my actual position. Where I see no resemblance, hard to do more than post a denial and move on. I don’t care whether you are deliberately misrepresenting my words, or arguing with the voices in your head.
Sometimes I am unclear, but it is hard to be clear when communicating with someone who is looking for “gotcha”s he can pounce on. Sometimes you think I have committed a gotcha, and I really have no idea what led you to that impression.
I attributed Ruth being coerced to you, Jim, because the whole point of handling people as property i.e. slavery is to be able to coerce them at whim. Of course the fact that ancient peoples proudly asserted that they were free people rather than slaves totally doesn’t imply a difference between patriarchal guardianship and outright slavery with the family household, does it?
When I advocate slavery for the undeserving poor, that is indeed the point – that people who make bad decisions for themselves, need someone else to make decisions for them.
But not always the point for women, and most certainly not the point for Ruth in particular, who was, as Boaz tells us, never apt to do the stupid and immoral thing.
A lot of the Old Testament rules coerced women to do the sensible thing when their natural inclination is to do the stupid and immoral thing. Similarly with the extremely drastic coercion applied by the Australian authorities to early female convict settlers. However the main value of patriarchy is not that the man can coerce the woman into not doing stupid and self destructive things, for Ruth was never going to do such things, but that the man and the women shall be stuck with each other, like it or not, so that they can produce and raise children with confidence.
Ruth’s claim is that she is required to have sex with Boaz, and Boaz is required to have sex with her. Deuteronomy 25:5-10. Which is what makes anointing her body and sneaking into his bed in the middle of the night when he is half drunk moral rather than immoral.
Hence the rule in the old testament, restated more broadly and vigorously in the new, that not only is the wife required to have sex with the husband whether she feels like it or not, but the husband is required to have sex with the wife whether he feels like it or not. If one party can have divorce on demand, can refuse reproductive sex at will, this makes it risky for the other to engage in reproductive sex.
Had Boaz not been able to cut a deal with the nearer heir of Elimelech, he would have handed Ruth and Naomi over to him, and Ruth and the nearer heir would have performed their duty to each other, and no doubt Ruth would have performed her duty with good cheer, because she was, Boaz tells us, a virtuous woman.
Except the point of the book was the obligations Ruth willingly took on not the obligations she was roped into by her family…
Regardless, I am interested not in the point of the book, but the obligations Ruth was stuck with by family.
Jim: Ruth tried to tell Boaz that he already owned her, when it was unclear who owned her
Normal People: Makes sense.
Hidden Author: But wait, what about the coercion? I only understand stories where one person oppresses another and I know who I’m supposed to hate
Yes but Ruth embraced the obligations of Jewish Law willingly; she could have stayed in Moab instead. This point, the point of the Book, shows that Ruth was not property so much as she was loyal to the family of Naomi and on that basis, embraced Jewish Law as her personal code of regulations.
The question is, what are the obligations of Jewish law? On the face of it, Deuteronomy 25:5-10 means that female consent is legally irrelevant, that women can be, and routinely are, assigned to particular men even if they don’t want to be assigned to that man, and are expected to perform their marital duties as cheerfully as they can manage. And, in the story of Ruth, we find that Ruth’s consent is indeed legally irrelevant. Ruth does not own herself, therefore cannot give herself to Boaz, and Naomi does not own herself, therefore cannot give Ruth to Boaz.
Now obviously Naomi and Ruth are gaming the system to get themselves owned by the man they would rather have owning them, and Ruth persuades Boaz to game the system in order to get ownership of Ruth. But legally, what Ruth wants, and even what Boaz wants, is irrelevant. Of course Boaz was a mighty man, and a man of wealth, and the law is notoriously apt to bend for such as him. And bend it did. But in the process of seeing the law bent to fit the desires of Ruth and Boaz, we get to see that Deuteronomy 25:5-10 means what it says, and says what it means, even if it does not always succeed in constraining the desires of hot women and mighty men.
It’s funny. You guys claim to be advocates of order and peace and claim that adherents of modern ideas (whether mainstream conservative or genuinely leftist) are advocates of disorder and conflict. Yet you guys are the ones who assert the right to own other people as opposed to the other side (at least in theory) asserting people’s right to be left alone (i.e. to possess freedom). Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that asserting the right to own other people is a cause of conflict? I’m sure it has because the whole point of this blog is to provide a place where you guys can discuss such ideas without getting burned by the consequences of such ideas. But remember such ideas generate no conflict between people whatsoever!
The libertarian solution, leaving people alone, only works if all those people well behaved. Problem is that we are importing very large numbers of people who are badly behaved, who demand free stuff, and who, if the government failed to provide them with free stuff, would starve and thus promptly set about taking free stuff for themselves. These people need to be dealt with.
Having solved the problem of those kind of people, the gimmiedats, only then we can apply the libertarian solution for the better class of people.
The statistics say about a third of the black male population goes through the legal system in their lives (if I recall correctly) but then under the antebellum slave system you praised, the vast majority of blacks were slaves. You then wonder why I call you anti-black and a supporter of draconian repression.
And when not in the legal system, are usually living on free stuff and creating a danger to each other and to whites, which danger has the result that the choicest areas of real estate, the areas with the shortest commute to work, are largely occupied by people who do not work.
Yeah, I guess not working and creating dangers and destruction is a better gig than slavery.
Hidden Author
quote It’s funny. You guys claim to be advocates of order and peace and claim that adherents of modern ideas (whether mainstream conservative or genuinely leftist) are advocates of disorder and conflict. Yet you guys are the ones who assert the right to own other people as opposed to the other side (at least in theory) asserting people’s right to be left alone (i.e. to possess freedom). Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that asserting the right to own other people is a cause of conflict?/quote
This is stupid on two levels one of which is really obvious.
First the really obviously wrong argument – you’re claiming that black violence is cause by NR rhetoric or simply lack of libertarianism. Right, Michael Brown was a peaceful soul until he read jim’s blog one day then he went on a crime spree which ended in his tragic shooting.
Second the more subtle one – slavery still exists and will always exist. It’s a fact of human society and isn’t going anywhere. If someone can’t sell their labor for a high enough price to afford food and shelter they either starve to death, die of exposure, live as bandits or become slaves to a master who either keeps them as a pet or gets more value in labor out of them than the slave could produce by freely contracting his labor – enough more to be able to afford to feed, clothe and shelter the slave. Living as a bandit in a civilized region is basically impossible – if you don’t get strung up by the locals (because the locals are not permitted to string up criminals) then they adapt in other ways – like using credit cards instead of cash everywhere. That leaves slavery. Most black people in the United States will live as slaves for at least some part of their lives.
The progressive state is just a shitty slave owner and doesn’t stop its slaves from rampaging.
I’m not saying that government racism causes Michael Brown’s criminality any more than government racism causes the criminality of the Aryan Brotherhood. What I’m saying is that your desire to make blacks as a whole second-class citizens, deport them, enslave them, lynch them or whatever your favorite repression is today based on the individual behavior of Michael Brown is what causes discord. Conservatives say they don’t want to do that and mean it but then the Left digs up retards who say the sorts of things you say in order to “prove” that the conservatives were really secret racists after all.
Tl;dr: Your kind of rhetoric doesn’t help society.
So they burned down Ferguson because they read my blog.
So Jim, can you prove that the welfare, the vandalism and the parasitism are traits of blacks as a whole or en masse as opposed to the traits of the one-third that cycles through the legal system?
I am not proposing to enslave every black and only blacks, so your question is stupid and irrelevant.
jim –
Hidden Author
No, he’s saying that the evil eye of you thinking wrong thoughts causes it.
BURN THE WITCH!!!
Blockquote broken, have not been able to fix it.
But yes, you have left wing reasoning in a nutshell. Evil thoughts cause these problems directly, without any material mechanism of causation. If everyone believed, then the any unpleasant facts causing doubt would go away.
No, nobody burned down Ferguson because of your blog. Personally, I think burning down Ferguson was all about opportunistic self-interest on the parts of all parties involved. But have you ever wondered why these sanctimonious opportunists can portray themselves as agents of the greater good? Should people have to pick one of two options as to whether burning down a town in 21st-century America or confining, flogging and extorting slaves on a 19th-century plantation was bad? Or should we who are not Leftists put away any egotistic domination fetishes we (more particularly, you) have and be content to say that both were bad?
Just noticed another funny thing.
Ruth’s marriage to Boaz-Ruth’s presence at the gate is not explicitly mentioned.
Jim: she wasn’t even there, nobody asked for her consent!
Rivka’s marriage to Itzhak. Bethuel is not explicitly mentioned as present in the morning (and needless to say is not present in Canaan when they get back), Avraham isn’t there, but Rivka is, and gives her consent explicitly (which puts a stop to the debate).
Jim: Rivka’s consent is irrelevant, the deal is between Avraham and Bethuel!
See what I mean about arguing in bad faith?
Rebekah never gives formal consent to anyone. There is no wedding ceremony in the Old Testament at which a woman gives formal and witnessed consent.
Genesis 24. The deal is made between Abraham’s servant and Rebekah’s father Nahor. Rebekah informally consents later, after the deal is made, and after payment is made.
When she finally meets Isaac for the first time, there is no wedding ceremony. She just introduces herself and goes to his tent.
>Rebekah never gives formal consent to anyone. There is no wedding ceremony in the Old Testament at which a woman gives formal and witnessed consent.
This is sophistry. You understand perfectly well that the point is that when it’s convenient, you point to someone not being explicitly described at being in a certain place at a certain time as incontrovertible proof that they weren’t there, and when it’s convenient, you assume their presence.
>Genesis 24. The deal is made between Abraham’s servant and Rebekah’s father Nahor.
You can’t get the minor details right, how do you argue about the big picture? Rivka’s father was Bethuel, not Nahor. When there was a dispute, he is not mentioned at all.
>When she finally meets Isaac for the first time, there is no wedding ceremony. She just introduces herself and goes to his tent.
You understand that the Torah is not a court transcript? It covers spans of decades in the space of a sentence. It doesn’t have to spell out that Rivka met Avraham, that there was a wedding, etc. etc. etc.
If the story is about courtship and a marriage, and leaves out the wedding ceremony, then no wedding ceremony.
We are given a moment by moment account from Isaac’s meeting with Rebekah, to them going to bed together. Therefore, no wedding ceremony.
The story is about many different things, and the Torah chooses how to present it so we can learn these things from it. If you had written it, it would read differently, but you didn’t and it doesn’t.
There is no moment-by-moment account. For instance, Eliezer’s travels to Mesopotamia and back take a sentence or so each, while in real life they would have taken weeks. When it says “she went to Itzhak’s tent and she became his wife and he loved her,” this is not a moment-by-moment account.
From the moment that Rebekah sees Isaac, the last phrase of Genesis 24:63 to the moment she goes to his tent, the first phrase of Genesis 24:67, it is a moment-by-moment account. Therefore, no wedding. Therefore, no formal consent, by either Rebekah or Isaac.
>From the moment that Rebekah sees Isaac, the last phrase of Genesis 24:63 to the moment she goes to his tent, the first phrase of Genesis 24:67, it is a moment-by-moment account.
You say so, but it’s not evident to me.
>Therefore, no wedding. Therefore, no formal consent, by either Rebekah or Isaac.
Again, not evident (and would be irrelevant to the core of the discussion, and to my point in this case, which is that you interpret the absence of a statement of someone’s presence at an event one way when it suits you and another when it doesn’t.
the reason it is fortunate that women do not accomplish anything is that it makes feminism sound less plausible. We would need to go through a complicated argument involving statistics if it were not the case that women have not actually accomplished anything they are claimed to have accomplished. In fact, it simplifies our argument, being as that the fraud enabling claims of female accomplishments is the same fraud found everywhere else on the Left.
Refusing to see things abstractly, you interpret it as some weird kind of envy.
>>Refusing to see things abstractly
So Jim doesn’t base his arguments on self-interest from beginning to end? This is a guy who asserts that true morality is based on egotistical self-regard for oneself and one’s kin rather than any sort of universalist goodwill to humanity. The thing is, is that when clannish peoples have connived to extract their self-interest at the expense of the rest of humanity, they did not exclude dishonesty from the means, fair or foul, used to achieve their ends.
How about we base morality on not committing the seven deadly sins? Alternatively, we can base morality on not doing the seven things prohibited for children of Noah.
No, you want “goodwill for humanity”. This means “non-aggression”, which means giving people whatever rights they need in order to be equal.
For example, a bunch of college students are in a room with a professor. The students demand that they be given A’s and not need to study anything they’re not interested in.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a nice short story about this, *Harrison Bergeron*, at around the time that the New Left was purging the American Communist Party of the Old Left by accusing comrades of White Chauvinism.
Yes because the only two options are white supremacism/elitist hierarchy or the most extreme version of the Left possible…
If all men are created equal, then any observed inequality is an injustice, and those responsible for the injustice need to be punished.
And yet, strangely the punishment fails to result in equality. Therefore, we need more severe punishments.
Anything short of Khmer Rouge autogenocide is an unprincipled exception, and each unprincipled exception gets taken away sooner or later.
Even if equality is *a* moral principle, it is not the *only* moral principle. Even Pol Pot held high office, after all. But Pol Pot seems to be your favorite straw man…
Another moral principle could be cooperation to get important things done. So instead of classes fighting for dominance, each class concedes to the other what it needs. This opens up a range of policy options: to the right, there is philanthropy, charity and the Church; to the center, there is trade unions and the welfare state; to the left, there is social democracy. All these are alternatives to unrestrained aristocracy and Communism that open to policymakers that are unrestrained by one-dimensional thinking. How amazing! ;D
“Classes fighting for dominance”
The proposition that we can conceptualize classes as if they were individuals with individual wills is an error that unfailing leads to mass murder.
Classes are not the kind of entity that fight for dominance, and if you think that they are, you necessarily wind up murdering extraordinarily large numbers of people.
Of course people don’t always follow “class interests” anymore than they adhere to “racial interests”. But there have been classes with the right to rule (aristocracies, theocracies, republics with property restrictions on the vote) whose individual members have sought to preserve their ability to rule just as there have been people who have been ruled who sought justice or sought to soften the way the rulers governed them or have sought to overthrow the people ruling them.
Regardless you seem perfectly comfortable lumping people together–women, blacks, slaves, people without property, etc.–as inferior blocs of people that need to be subjected en masse so why is that more morally legitimate than the other side arguing that such groups need to freed from subjugation? And isn’t both your side and the opposing side in such an argument having a debate that’s all about which class interest is morally legitimate, even if the concept of class interest imperfectly aligns itself to the personal interests of each individual within a given socioeconomic class?
Treating different kinds of people differently is not the same thing as treating each member of a particular kind in the same way. Indeed, it almost the opposite of that. Whereas if you base decisions on class analysis, you treat every member of a group as the same person, as a literally single individual, which invariably leads to terror and mass murder, particularly when you find it hard to map the classes of your imagination onto actual people.
Thus, for example, men oppress women, so it does not matter whether a particular individual male raped a particular individual woman or not.
You have no difficulty having one law for men and a different law for women, indeed you insist on it. Why not one law for whites and one law for blacks?
When did I say I advocated different laws for men and women? Your problem is that you think there are only two political factions: Us (your side) vs. Them (the extreme Left). Actually there is a whole political spectrum; in fact, it’s more complex than that: people have been known to like some ideas from the Left, some from the Center, some from the Right. What a shock!
We have different laws for men and women, and the differences have become steadily more extreme. Repealing the differences (a crazy Men’s Rights Activist position that I do not support) is far outside the Overton Window. You are well inside the Overton window.
You might deny that the laws are different, but it would be completely unthinkable for you to propose that they cease to be different. You are inside the Overton Window. Equality before the law for men and women is far outside the Overton Window.
Elaborate…
MRAs have a long, long, long list that causes my eyes to glaze over. If you were to look at the list, I am sure you would proceed to quibble with each and every item, denying the undeniable and defending the undefendable. One rather infamous item on the list is “VAWA”, the Violence Against Women Act, which differs from the other items only in that they put inequality before the law into the very title of the legislation.
[…] week Jim takes on that age-old and knotty problem of White on Black Crime that we hear about constantly on the […]
OT: I can see the root of your complaining. You complain about being oppressed by the Left; furthermore you’re about the only one with the right to complain since most if not all other people complaining about oppression are affiliated with the dominant Leftist apparatus (the Cathedral).
But there is a solution! If you live in a boat out on international waters or if you live in Antarctica, progressive governments will not rule you because no governments will rule you. And then you can set up an extremely patriarchal, extremely authoritarian governance over your household until the day you die!