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>> Why יהושע must be the Jewish Messiah if יהוה is the LORD.
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>> Some Christians, such as Guardian Snow, know for a fact that יהוה is the LORD
>> and Elohim, while his son יהושע is the Messiah.
So, no response to the facts put before you. I knew it in advance
that you wouldn't be worth wasting any time on.
Isa 7:14-15 -
“Therefore the Lord, He will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin
conceives, and bears a son, and calls his name Immanuel. Butter and
honey will he eat, at the time that he knows to refuse the evil and
choose the good.”
In its form the prophecy reminds one of Gen_16:11, “Behold, thou art
with child, and wilt bear a son, and call his name Ishmael.” Here,
however, the words are not addressed to the person about to bear the
child, although Matthew gives this interpretation to the prophecy;
(Note: Jerome discusses this diversity in a very impartial and
intelligent manner, in his ep. ad Pammachium de optimo genere
interpretandi.)
for קָרָאת is not the second person, but the third, and is synonymous
with קָרְאָה (according to Ges. §74. Anm. 1), another form which is
also met with in Gen_33:11; Lev_25:21; Deu_31:29, and Psa_118:23.
(Note: The pointing makes a distinction between קָרָאת (she calls) and
קָרָאתְ, as Gen_16:11 should be pointed (thou callest); and Olshausen
(§35, b) is wrong in pronouncing the latter a mistake.)
Moreover, the condition of pregnancy, which is here designated by the
participial adjective הָרָה (cf., 2Sa_11:5), was not an already
existing one in this instance, but (as in all probability also in
Jdg_13:5, cf., Jdg_13:4) something future, as well as the act of
bearing, since hinnēh is always used by Isaiah to introduce a future
occurrence. This use of hinneh in Isaiah is a sufficient answer to
Gesenius, Knobel, and others, who understand hâ‛almâh as referring
to the young wife of the prophet himself, who was at that very time
with child. But it is altogether improbable that the wife of the
prophet himself should be intended.
For if it were to her that he referred, he could hardly have expressed
himself in a more ambiguous and unintelligible manner; and we cannot
see why he should not much rather have said אִשְׁתִּי or הַנְּבִיאָה,
to say nothing of the fact that there is no further allusion made to
any son of the prophet of that name, and that a sign of this kind
founded upon the prophet's own family affairs would have been one of a
very precarious nature.
And the meaning and use of the word ‛almâh are also at variance with
this. For whilst bethulâh (from bâtthal, related to bâdal, to
separate, sejungere) signifies a maiden living in seclusion in her
parents' house and still a long way from matrimony, ‛almâh (from
‛âlam, related to Châlam, and possibly also to אָלַם, to be strong,
full of vigour, or arrived at the age of puberty) is applied to one
fully mature, and approaching the time of her marriage.
(Note: On the development of the meanings of ‛âlam and Châlam, see
Ges. Thes., and my Psychol. p. 282 (see also the commentary on
Job_39:4). According to Jerome, alma was Punic also. In Arabic and
Aramaean the diminutive form guleime, ‛alleimtah, was the favourite
one, but in Syriac ‛alīmto (the ripened).)
The two terms could both be applied to persons who were betrothed, and
even to such as were married (Joe_2:16; Pro_30:19 : see Hitzig on
these passages). It is also admitted that the idea of spotless
virginity was not necessarily connected with ‛almâh (as in Gen_24:43,
cf., Gen_24:16), since there are passages - such, for example, as
Son_6:8 - where it can hardly be distinguished from the Arabic
surrīje; and a person who had a very young-looking wife might be said
to have an ‛almah for his wife. But it is inconceivable that in a well-
considered style, and one of religious earnestness, a woman who had
been long married, like the prophet's own wife, could be called
hâ‛almâh without any reserve.
(Note: A young and newly-married wife might be called Callâh (as in
Homer νύμφη = nubilis and nupta; Eng. bride); and even in Homer a
married woman, if young, is sometimes called κουριδίη ἄλοχος, but
neither κούρη nor νεῆνις.)
On the other hand, the expression itself warrants the assumption that
by hâ‛almâh the prophet meant one of the ‛alâmoth of the king's
harem (Luzzatto); and if we consider that the birth of the child was
to take place, as the prophet foresaw, in the immediate future, his
thoughts might very well have been fixed upon Abijah (Abi) bath-
Zechariah (2Ki_18:2; 2Ch_29:1), who became the mother of king
Hezekiah, to whom apparently the virtues of the mother descended, in
marked contrast with the vices of his father. This is certainly
possible. At the same time, it is also certain that the child who was
to be born was the Messiah, and not a new Israel (Hofmann,
Schriftbeweis, ii. 1, 87, 88); that is to say, that he was no other
than that “wonderful” heir of the throne of David, whose birth is
hailed with joy in chapter 9, where even commentators like Knobel are
obliged to admit that the Messiah is meant. It was the Messiah whom
the prophet saw here as about to be born, then again in chapter 9 as
actually born, and again in chapter 11 as reigning - an indivisible
triad of consolatory images in three distinct states, interwoven with
the three stages into which the future history of the nation unfolded
itself in the prophet's view.
If, therefore, his eye was directed towards the Abijah mentioned, he
must have regarded her as the future mother of the Messiah, and her
son as the future Messiah. Now it is no doubt true, that in the course
of the sacred history Messianic expectations were often associated
with individuals who did not answer to them, so that the Messianic
prospect was moved further into the future; and it is not only
possible, but even probable, and according to many indications an
actual fact, that the believing portion of the nation did concentrate
their Messianic wishes and hopes for a long time upon Hezekiah; but
even if Isaiah's prophecy may have evoked such human conjectures and
expectations, through the measure of time which it laid down, it would
not be a prophecy at all, if it rested upon no better foundation than
this, which would be the case if Isaiah had a particular maiden of his
own day in his mind at the time.
Are we to conclude, then, that the prophet did not refer to any one
individual, but that the “virgin” was a personification of the house
of David? This view, which Hofmann propounded, and Stier appropriated,
and which Ebrard has revived, notwithstanding the fact that Hofmann
relinquished it, does not help us over the difficulty; for we should
expect in that case to find “daughter of Zion,” or something of the
kind, since the term “virgin” is altogether unknown in a
personification of this kind, and the house of David, as the prophet
knew it, was by no means worthy of such an epithet.
No other course is left, therefore, than to assume that whilst, on the
one hand, the prophet meant by “the virgin” a maiden belonging to the
house of David, which the Messianic character of the prophecy
requires; on the other hand, he neither thought of any particular
maiden, nor associated the promised conception with any human father,
who could not have been any other than Ahaz. The reference is the same
as in Mic_5:3 (“she which travaileth,” yōlēdah). The objection that
hâ‛almâh (the virgin) cannot be a person belonging to the future, on
account of the article (Hofmann, p. 86), does not affect the true
explanation: it was the virgin whom the spirit of prophecy brought
before the prophet's mind, and who, although he could not give her
name, stood before him as singled out for an extraordinary end
(compare the article in hanna‛ar in Num_11:27 etc.).
With what exalted dignity this mother appeared to him to be invested,
is evident from the fact that it is she who gives the name to her son,
and that the name Immanuel. This name sounds full of promise. But if
we look at the expression “therefore,” and the circumstance which
occasioned it, the sign cannot have been intended as a pure or simple
promise. We naturally expect, first, that it will be an extraordinary
fact which the prophet foretells; and secondly, that it will be a fact
with a threatening front. Now a humiliation of the house of David was
indeed involved in the fact that the God of whom it would know nothing
would nevertheless mould its future history, as the emphatic הוּא
implies, He (αὐτός, the Lord Himself), by His own impulse and
unfettered choice.
Moreover, this moulding of the future could not possibly be such an
one as was desired, but would of necessity be as full of threatening
to the unbelieving house of David as it was full of promise to the
believers in Israel. And the threatening character of the “sign” is
not to be sought for exclusively in Isa_7:15, since both the
expressions “therefore” (lâcēn) and “behold” (hinnēh) place the
main point of the sign in Isa_7:14, whilst the introduction of
Isa_7:15 without any external connection is a clear proof that what is
stated in Isa_7:14 is the chief thing, and not the reverse. But the
only thing in Isa_7:14 which indicated any threatening element in the
sign in question, must have been the fact that it would not be by
Ahaz, or by a son of Ahaz, or by the house of David generally, which
at that time had hardened itself against God, that God would save His
people, but that a nameless maiden of low rank, whom God had singled
out and now showed to the prophet in the mirror of His counsel, would
give birth to the divine deliverer of His people in the midst of the
approaching tribulations, which was a sufficient intimation that He
who was to be the pledge of Judah's continuance would not arrive
without the present degenerate house of David, which had brought Judah
to the brink of ruin, being altogether set aside.
But the further question arises here, What constituted the
extraordinary character of the fact here announced? It consisted in
the fact, that, according to Isa_9:5, Immanuel Himself was to be a
פֶּלֶא (wonder or wonderful). He would be God in corporeal self-
manifestation, and therefore a “wonder” as being a superhuman person.
We should not venture to assert this if it went beyond the line of Old
Testament revelation, but the prophet asserts it himself in Isa_9:5
(cf., Isa_10:21): his words are as clear as possible; and we must not
make them obscure, to favour any preconceived notions as to the
development of history.
The incarnation of Deity was unquestionably a secret that was not
clearly unveiled in the Old Testament, but the veil was not so thick
but that some rays could pass through. Such a ray, directed by the
spirit of prophecy into the mind of the prophet, was the prediction of
Immanuel. But if the Messiah was to be Immanuel in this sense, that He
would Himself be El (God), as the prophet expressly affirms, His birth
must also of necessity be a wonderful or miraculous one. The prophet
does not affirm, indeed, that the “‛almâh,” who had as yet known no
man, would give birth to Immanuel without this taking place, so that
he could not be born of the house of David as well as into it, but be
a gift of Heaven itself; but this “‛almâh” or virgin continued
throughout an enigma in the Old Testament, stimulating
“inquiry” (1Pe_1:10-12), and waiting for the historical solution. Thus
the sign in question was, on the one hand, a mystery glaring in the
most threatening manner upon the house of David; and, on the other
hand, a mystery smiling with which consolation upon the prophet and
all believers, and couched in these enigmatical terms, in order that
those who hardened themselves might not understand it, and that
believers might increasingly long to comprehend its meaning.
In Isa_7:15 the threatening element of Isa_7:14 becomes the
predominant one. It would not be so, indeed, if “butter (thickened
milk) and honey” were mentioned here as the ordinary food of the
tenderest age of childhood (as Gesenius, Hengstenberg, and others
suppose). But the reason afterwards assigned in Isa_7:16, Isa_7:17,
teaches the very opposite. Thickened milk and honey, the food of the
desert, would be the only provisions furnished by the land at the time
in which the ripening youth of Immanuel would fall. חֶמְאָה (from
הָמָא, to be thick) is a kind of butter which is still prepared by
nomads by shaking milk in skins. It may probably include the cream, as
the Arabic semen signifies both, but not the curds or cheese, the name
of which (at least the more accurate name) if gebīnâh. The object to
יָדַע is expressed in Isa_7:15, Isa_7:16 by infinitive absolutes
(compare the more usual mode of expression in Isa_8:4).
The Lamed prefixed to the verb does not mean “until” (Ges. §131, 1),
for Lamed is never used as so definite an indication of the terminus
ad quem; the meaning is either “towards the time when he
understands” (Amo_4:7, cf., Lev_24:12, “to the end that”), or about
the time, at the time when he understands (Isa_10:3; Gen_8:11;
Job_24:14). This kind of food would coincide in time with his
understanding, that is to say, would run parallel to it.
Incapacity to distinguish between good and bad is characteristic of
early childhood (Deu_1:39, etc.), and also of old age when it relapses
into childish ways (2Sa_19:36). The commencement of the capacity to
understand is equivalent to entering into the so-called years of
discretion - the riper age of free and conscious self-determination.
By the time that Immanuel reached this age, all the blessings of the
land would have been so far reduced, that from a land full of
luxuriant corn-fields and vineyards, it would have become a large
wooded pasture-ground, supplying milk and honey, and nothing more. A
thorough devastation of the land is therefore the reason for this
limitation to the simplest, and, when compared with the fat of wheat
and the cheering influence of wine, most meagre and miserable food.
And this is the ground assigned in Isa_7:16, Isa_7:17. Two successive
and closely connected events would occasion this universal desolation.
Shalom,
Snow
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
George S. Patton
