Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Malachi 2:13-15

In Malachi 2:13-15, certain men are specifically rebuked by God for having broken faith with the wife of their marriage covenant.  Their tears and offerings to God are not accepted because of this unfaithfulness, and yet there are some fools, whether for or against Mosaic Law (which is the most central, precise, and crucial moral revelation out of the whole Bible), who would say that Biblical adultery is exclusively a married woman and any man other than her husband having sex.  They imagine that these actions with inverted genders are not condemned, as long as the married man does not have sex with someone like a separately married woman.  Men can have multiple wives (which is true according to Deuteronomy 4:2, 21:15-17, and Exodus 21:9-11 though polyamory is not only for men), supposedly, but women cannot have multiple husbands.

Some say the Bible teaches this and that it is logical and just (and they are utterly wrong on all fronts here), and some say it teaches this and that it is irrational and evil (and they are utterly wrong about the Bible teaching such a thing).  Obviously, the men of Malachi 2:13-15 are not treated as if they cannot be unfaithful to their wife, though having multiple wives is not automatically sinful.  Lest some imbecile think that Malachi is "correcting" or "evolving" God's moral demands in Mosaic Law as some suppose Jesus to do in spite of Matthew 5:17-19 and 15:1-20, it is shortly after this that God says he does not change (Malachi 3:6), and just prior to this, God promises to take action against those who commit miscellaneous sins prohibited in Mosaic Law (3:5), like sorcery (Exodus 22:18), adultery (Deuteronomy 22:22), and defrauding laborers of their wages (24:14-15).  Malachi is clearly not treating adultery as only a sin committed by a married woman against her husband or a man against another man, which contradicts the sexist interpretation against polyandry which would also allow married men to have some extramarital sex.  What, though, of Mosaic Law itself?

Does the Torah itself say married men can have extramarital sex as long as the woman is not one prohibited for other reasons, such as by virtue of being a separately married women?  Worse, though it would be connected to the former, does the Torah permit rape of men by women while saying that men cannot rape women, particularly another man's wife due to hurting another man's "property"?  No, and it also teaches rationalistic and egalitarian consistency with both these examples of sexual sins--with Deuteronomy 22:25-27 alone, for instance, without Genesis 1:26-27, the wording of how rape is like murder already addresses all rape by or against either gender.  With adultery and by extension the alleged universal sin of polyandry, the pathetic confusion reduces to the willful misunderstanding of the phrase "another man's wife" [1].  It is actually astonishing in one sense that some people are so stupid, but then again, the world is full of non-rationalists, and one of the only things that rivals the idiocy of a non-rationalist is that of another one!  There are many ways to discover this, some of which I delve into within the linked posts in the footnote.  However, of most of these reasons are not obvious to someone reading the Bible, they are very fucking stupid indeed.

Aside from the real statements of the Torah, the men of Malachi 2:13-15, again, are condemned for being unfaithful to their wives, which is something that is of course condemned by Exodus 20:14 in the Decalogue, by Genesis 1:26-27 in conjunction with verses like Deuteronomy 22:22, by Leviticus 18:20 and 20:9 in light of the gender neutral context of Leviticus 18:6 which starts the listing of sexual sins (as well as how Leviticus 18:18 and 20:21 address the same sin committed by either a woman or a man, just stated as if addressed to men), and so on.  The wording never suggests this, the literal statements of the Bible contradict this, and, if the Bible is true as miscellaneous evidence points to, it would have to be perfectly consistent with the necessary truths of logic, which includes the fact that something is not permissible or immoral for either men or women if it does not pertain to their strict genitalia (like circumcision to remove the foreskin).

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.


[1].

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