Thought Criminal Is Back!

Really, I'm glad to see this (and I hope his recovery is strong and sure). And I'd be saying this at his blog if my browser wasn't determined to block me from posting comments (and yeah I could probably fix that but I'm tired of figuring out what setting is making me nuts this time around.) So I'm going to excerpt something here because I want to put my my $.02.

I think what we have are divergent textual traditions and no way of knowing which is right.  Since the Gospel writers likely used Greek as one of their common languages, the reason that the entire New Testament is written in it, it was natural that they would have known and used as authoritative the Greek version, especially the author of Luke and Acts.  If not for the original text of the New Testament, certainly in later generations, the Greek versions of the older Scriptures would have been more available to them than the Hebrew version(s).  What the actual prophet of Isaiah 7:14 said about the virginity or not of the mother of Immanuel, who can know?  Here's the text in what I gather the editors have selected as its context from the Study Bible:

10 The LORD  spoke further to Ahaz: 11 " Ask for a sign from the LORD  your God, anywhere down to Sheol or up to the sky." 12 But Ahaz replied, "I will not ask, and I will not test the LORD." 13 "Listen, House of David'7 The LORD  will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as never have come since," [Isaiah] retorted, "is it not enough for you to treat men as helpless that you also treat my God as helpless?1 14 Assuredly, my LORD  will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel. 15 (By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.) 16 For before the lad knows to reject the bad and choose the good, the ground whose two kings you dread shall be abandoned. 17 The LORD  will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as never have come since Ephraim turned away from Judah-that self same king of Assyria!

And as is pointed out in their preface, Isaiah is one of the most complex books of Scripture, it's especially opaque.  The commentary in the Study Bible on this particular issue says:

1 4: Young woman (Heb '"almah"). The Septuagint translates as "virgin,"leading ancient and medieval Christians to connect this verse with the New Testament figure of Mary. All modern scholars, however,agree that the Heb merely denotes a young woman of marriageable age, whether married or unmarried, whether a virgin or not. 1 5-17: The message the sign represents is two-fold: God is with Judah, both to protect it (v. 16) and to punish it (v. 17).

And, to be fair to the commentators, this is their commentary on the larger context of the whole section:

10-1 7: Apparently Ahaz chooses to rely on the intervention of the Assyrian king (cf. 2 Kings 16.7--9

I'd say in context of the wider passage - and exactly what it means is certainly open to different interpretations, whether or not his mother was a virgin when he was conceived, before the boy "Immanuel" is of age to discern good and bad the kings that Ahaz fears will not be around and their realms will be empty.  I don't know in context if that might mean Assyria and Babylon but their dynasties had certainly fallen by the time of Jesus but that time was well off from when Isaiah is dated by modern scholarship. I don't know what other identifications of the two dreaded kings have been made, maybe by Christmas I'll have found out. 

I just wanted to say I've read Isaiah 7 as a message of hope more than a prediction of a certain future.  There's really not a whole lot of prognostication in the Scriptures, Hebrew or Christian.  "Prophets" in the Hebrew Scriptures don't predict future events like Iron Age Nostradamus, but tell Israel the truth of the here and now.  And part of that "here and now" for First Isaiah is that the ordinariness of life (the quotidian, as Kathleen Norris taught me to call it) will continue (as first Isaiah is writing Israel is collapsing.  You think we got problems today?  Whoo, boy, buddy, you don't know the meaning of "problems!"), that hope will prevail.  He is telling Israel not to lose sight of this important truth.  It may seem like "truth" with a small "t" to us, but huge abstract truth is, I find, pretty much worthless to everyone.  Wisdom comes not in discerning grand ideas, but in understanding the importance of small ones in the quotidian.

The young woman, then, is not Mary wife of Joseph, but a young woman who will bear a child.  Children are the symbol, the very essence, of hope; of persistence, of surviving the now and staking a claim on the future.  And the child won't be a super-hero savior who smites Israel's enemies and restores the old days of Solomonic glory days (which were great for Solomon, but not so much for everybody else).  By the time the child comes along and Israel remembers again Immanuel (God is with us)*, the kings contending over Israel will be dust ("Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.")  The very essence of hope is that there will be a future, that we will survive our enemies and our despair.  They will rage, they will thunder, but they will not last; Israel will. So Isaiah is not predicting a date, or even an event, in the future.  Isaiah is just offering grounds for hope, and assurance that God is not helpless, and all is not lost.

Was that young woman Mary, and that child Jesus, anyway?  Sure; could be.  Could not be.  As the old Evangelical (German, not modern American) Church put it at every communion service:  "Let it be unto you according to your faith."  Isaiah wasn't setting out dates on a calendar; Isaiah was explaining the way things really work.  He wasn't saying "God will do this on this date;" he wasn't even saying God will do this certain thing.  He was saying God is not helpless, the situation for Israel is not the end, the negation, death.  That life will continue, and Israel will know for certain again Immanuel.  How will that happen?  When will that happen?  Irrelevant.

What matters it that it will happen.

I think we can have a fruitful conversation on these matters, especially during Advent.  There certainly won't be as much politics to discuss in the last weeks of the year.  And I'm always trying to return to Advent themes in December.

*it occurs to me belatedly to make this connection; and it's not a connection of "God" so much as of culture, as an explanation of naming a child "Immanuel," i.e., a symbolic name rather than a common one like "Joe" or "Charlie."  Hosea names his children to mark the unfaithfulness of Israel:

When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.” 3 So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

4 Then the Lord said to Hosea, “Call him Jezreel, because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel. 5 In that day I will break Israel’s bow in the Valley of Jezreel.”

6 Gomer conceived again and gave birth to a daughter. Then the Lord said to Hosea, “Call her Lo-Ruhamah (which means “not loved”), for I will no longer show love to Israel, that I should at all forgive them. 7 Yet I will show love to Judah; and I will save them—not by bow, sword or battle, or by horses and horsemen, but I, the Lord their God, will save them.”

8 After she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, Gomer had another son. 9 Then the Lord said, “Call him Lo-Ammi (which means “not my people”), for you are not my people, and I am not your God.

Prophets engage in a lot of symbolic behavior.  Ezekiel comes to mind, but I can't pinpoint a specific just now.  Lots of wrapping themselves in cloth and symbolizing the problems or doom of Israel, etc., etc.  Not unlike climate protestors tossing food on paintings in museums, frankly.  Makes more sense if you see it from the protestors point of view, and we usually do in Scripture since the prophet is telling us what he did, and why.  But to his peers you know it was as inexplicable as throwing tomatoes at a painting.

This passage is particularly troublesome because just as God is not us, the Israelites are not us, either.  In a post-Romantic post-Victorian world where children have become ever more important (when I was a kid if I came home with a note from the teacher I was in trouble, no questions asked.  Today it's the teacher who would be in trouble.), giving your children symbolic names makes us, well, uncomfortable.

Then again, we have celebrities giving their children weird names, and nobody blinks.  So I guess....

But the point is, children's names bearing significance for the community rather than the family (my oldest nephew is "Trey" because he's the third with the grandfather's name) is alien to us, but not to Israel at the time of the Exile. So just as Hosea names his children to teach Israel a truth, "Immanuel" is a symbolic name for God still being with Israel despite the terror of the Exile.  It doesn't have to mean, in other words, the same thing it does for Matthew, who has wholly other reasons for using that passage than first Isaiah did.  Not bad reasons, just different ones.

The quotidian is complex; but God is still with us there.