EmpiricalGod

What's the go with 2 Kings 19 & Isaiah 37 being identical?

why the unnecessary redundency?
Is that a problem with inspiration?
What do apologists have to say about this?

Joan of Bark

I'm too lazy to go to biblegateway.com and look them up, so please clarify: what is the passage and which version of the "inerrant word of God" are you using?

show_no_mercy

One was written before the exile and one written after? One is written by a "prophet" while the other was written as an attempt at "secular" history?

semiopen

etc.

Interesting passage, never knew this before.

semiopen

The word "Betulat" virgin is used here:

Isaiah 37:22
Going back to the discussions on "Almah" meaning young woman, this particular passage (x2) doesn't seem to score points in supporting the view that almah in Isaiah 7:14 means young woman.

Almah

I'm not clear on where it says almah in this passage but there are several excellent words present for "young woman."

Genesis 34-3
Here, girl is naara.

Genesis 34-4
Here, girl is yalda.

Sorry to veer off topic, but the argument for almah strictly meaning young woman seems to get more tenuous the more I look.

jakejonesiv

At least apologist can point to two chapters that do not contradict.

Toto

:notworthy:

John Kesler

See this post, which points other duplicate passages. To it, I will add that Psalms 14 and 53 are nearly identical, the biggest difference being that the former prefers Yahweh ("the LORD"), and the latter, elohim ("God").

gupwalla

First, a reminder of what the passage describes: the setting (which is, in fact, historical) is the siege of Hezekiah's Jerusalem by Sennacherib of Assyria c. 701 BCE. The quoted passage portrays Isaiah as a sage and advisor to the king during this crisis.

why the unnecessary redundency?

It is only redundant when the Hebrew texts are viewed as a single work. But, these were not always a single work -- they were separate works composed over a span of time and later collected into an orthodox cannon. That isn't controversial, even from a fundamentalist standpoint.

I would also not categorize the repetition as "unnecessary." The quoted passage "fits" into the narrative and purpose of each text. If you read Kings you need to know what was happening in the court during this critical historical event. If you read Isaiah, you need to ground Isaiah into the history and explain how his sermons reflect the situation at the time.

(The technical scholarly answer here is that the authors of both texts had access to a common source document detailing the court history of the southern monarchy. But that only answers "how" the texts are identical, not "why.")

Is that a problem with inspiration?

A strict fundamentalist would argue that each text was separately inspired, and the final collection of orthodox texts was separately inspired, so I'm not sure this is much of an argument against inspiration. A somewhat looser fundamentalist interpretation might acknowledge the common source text -- or the copying of one text directly by another -- but would also claim the source text as being inspired.

If I'm remembering correctly from my fundamentalist upbringing, fundamentalists place Isaiah as written contemporaneous with the events it describes (making it an early document) while Kings is acknowledged as late monarchy/early Exile. That is important because Isaiah is viewed as predictive prophecy, meaning it has to have been written before the events it predicts. Kings is history, and everyone expects history to be backward-looking.

Isaiah probably dates much later (and across several time periods) -- at its core, it is a comparison-contrast meditation on the fall of Israel and the siege of Jerusalem as seen through the lens of the fall of Judah and subsequent Exile. It's not at all hard to see why that would be an intriguing subject to think and write about.

What do apologists have to say about this?

"See, God whispered the exact! same! words!!!!1! to both Jeremiah and Isaiah! OMG QED!!!" (Simplified, but catches the gist of it)

EDIT:

OK, that last bit was rather too glib. It is only reflective of the knee-jerk, non-scholarly apologist sort and not reflective of more serious attempts. I will leave it because (a) I find it amusing and (b) I am not one to bury my sins in the dirt. I will, however, correct myself.

I cannot speak for apologists directly, not being among their group, but I think more serious apologists would take the stance that there is one true history of events, and two writers whose texts intersect at the same historical event would necessarily reference that same one true history in their separate accounts.

Duplication of the same text is permissible within both apologetic and textual frameworks, so it's not something that is going to tilt the scales to either side. It would actually be far more troubling for an apologist if Isaiah did not reference this event at all (opening up an Absence of Evidence attack) or if it included a contradictory account of the same episode (which would require harmonization). So, wholesale duplication represents a "best case" for apologists.

Equinox

OK, I checked what my official NIV (obtained from a Liberal Christian) said about authorship and date of writing of those books.

1&2 Kings -

Unknown, kingly author. Written after 562 BC, but before the end of the exile in 538 BC

Isaiah -

Written by Isaiah, who narrated events in his time. Chapters 1-39 were completed by 700 BC, the rest before Isaiah died in 681 BC.

So they don't match.

I googled it, and the apologist response seems to be that they both copied from a real, historical document, hence the repetition. However, that doesn't fit with Isaiah being the author. I think a better apologist response would be that the author of Kings copied Isaiah.

However, that doesn't seem to jive with it being inspired.

Other word for word repetitions are in Kgs vs. Chronicles.

g wrote:

(my bold)

But they aren't separate accounts - they are word for word identical for hundreds of words in a row. They had to be using a common source or copying from each other, as with kings vs chronicles and the synoptics. I guess apologists would just conclude that copying is OK?

Equinox