"Many men hoard for the future husbands of their wives"
About this Quote
A dagger in a line: he turns thrift into erotic farce. "Many men hoard for the future husbands of their wives" doesn’t just sneer at miserliness; it weaponizes a husband’s deepest medieval anxieties about legacy, honor, and control. The joke lands because the “future” here isn’t children or posterity but the humiliating prospect of replacement. Saving becomes a kind of unwitting dowry for the next man.
As a poet writing in the 11th-century Andalusi Jewish milieu, Ibn Gabirol is steeped in the period’s moral literature that treats greed as a spiritual sickness. But he sidesteps sermonizing. Instead, he offers a psychological ambush: the hoarder thinks he’s building safety, yet the very act of accumulation implies mistrust of the present and a fantasy of permanence that life doesn’t honor. The line compresses two fears into one: death (or dispossession) and sexual rivalry. What you stash away can outlive you, and what outlives you can serve someone else.
The phrasing is clinical, almost legalistic, which makes the insult colder. “Future husbands” is plural: it assumes not just a second marriage but a sequence, reducing the first husband to an early investor in an enterprise he doesn’t control. There’s also a sharp, gendered realism: wives are treated as socially transferable, and women’s remarriage is framed as a man’s nightmare, not her survival strategy. The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: your money won’t secure love, fidelity, or memory. It may only fund the world that forgets you.
As a poet writing in the 11th-century Andalusi Jewish milieu, Ibn Gabirol is steeped in the period’s moral literature that treats greed as a spiritual sickness. But he sidesteps sermonizing. Instead, he offers a psychological ambush: the hoarder thinks he’s building safety, yet the very act of accumulation implies mistrust of the present and a fantasy of permanence that life doesn’t honor. The line compresses two fears into one: death (or dispossession) and sexual rivalry. What you stash away can outlive you, and what outlives you can serve someone else.
The phrasing is clinical, almost legalistic, which makes the insult colder. “Future husbands” is plural: it assumes not just a second marriage but a sequence, reducing the first husband to an early investor in an enterprise he doesn’t control. There’s also a sharp, gendered realism: wives are treated as socially transferable, and women’s remarriage is framed as a man’s nightmare, not her survival strategy. The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: your money won’t secure love, fidelity, or memory. It may only fund the world that forgets you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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