Apikorus

• Sign (birth of Immanuel) signifies ticking clock.
• Immanuel reaches age of moral discernment signifies alarm bell.
• When alarm goes off, remove prophecy from oven for delicious redemption of Jerusalem.
• Amazing YHWH self-cleaning feature dispenses with charred remains of Ephraim and Damascus.

Gamera

That's the problem. Which kid? The result of what pregnancy? Young women get pregnant all the time.

Apikorus

Young women do get pregnant regularly, but they don't often give their children peculiar symbolic names, like "God is with us" and "spoil speeds, prey hastens." The peculiar name of the child is part of the sign.

The fact that Isaiah considers MSHB to be a sign and the mundane nature of his conception, plus the strong parallel to the Immanuel unit completely cripples your interpretation, in my view.

Diogenes the Cynic

You know, you can actually find that information in the story itself. The prophecy isn't left hanging.

Gamera

Here's is Isaiah's use of the word oth, sign. It always seems to involve something either odd or miraculous, not just an ordinary event used as a marker.

Isaiah 7:11 - "Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven."

Isaiah 7:14 - Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman'u-el.

Isaiah 19:20 - It [an altar and pillar in the desert] will be a sign and a witness to the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt; when they cry to the LORD because of oppressors he will send them a savior, and will defend and deliver them.

Isaiah 20:3 - the LORD said, "As my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Ethiopia,

Isaiah 66:19 - and I will set a sign among them. And from them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Put, and Lud, who draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands afar off, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations.

[by the way, I'm aware that Isaiah also uses oth to mean "banner" or "standard" but those are used literally and aren't appropriate to Isaiah 7.

Gamera

I can, but could a Jew in Isaiah's time? That's the issue. So the sign is a young lady will get pregnant and calls her son Immanuel (let's hope nobody else does). One way to resolve this is to determine how common the name was. If it was a common name, again, the sign is pretty useless.

Apikorus

No, you missed Isa 8:18, which completely destroys your case, in my view. In fact, the use of otot in Isa 8:18 in describing his children strongly suggests that Immanuel is also his child, and Immanuel's mother is Isaiah's wife.

Please explain: what miraculous sign is associated with MSHB?

And what is miraculous about a naked barefoot man? It is unusual, as is a child named "God is with us" (suggest you check for appearances of immanuel in the Hebrew Bible), but not quite miraculous.

Another problem with your analysis is that "sign" is paired with other words like "witness" (eid) or "wonder" (mofeit), and it might be that the second term in these pairings is what connotes something miraculous, while ot just signifies the "marker" aspect.

I'm also unclear as to the nature of the sign in 66:19. What is it? The dispersal of refugees? Is that miraculous?

I'm puzzled why you don't respond directly to my simple yet rigorous analysis of Isa 7-8. To recapitulate, Isa 8:18 identifies that the prophet and his sons serve "for signs and for wonders in Israel." One of his sons, MSHB, is introduced in the very same chapter. His conception is completely ordinary -- explicitly so -- but his name, like that of Immanuel, is unique. (Isa 7:14 is the only instance of the name Immanuel in the Hebrew bible. It goes without saying that 8:3 is the only instance of the name MSHB in the Hebrew Bible as well.) What, then, is the miraculous "sign" associated with MSHB? The strong parallels between the MSHB unit in Isa 8:3-4 and the Immanuel unit in Isa 7:10-16 rule out any miraculous birth for Immanuel. Could you respond to these points, please?

By the way, I still agree with spin that the most compelling reading of Isa 7:10-16 has the woman already pregnant, which of course rules out any future miraculous conception.

Diogenes the Cynic

If by "Isaiah's time," you mean the audience for the Book of Isaiah, then yes. Anyone who reads the story can know because the story TELLS you who it is.Resolve what? What difference does it make how common the name is? The kid is born in the next chapter. There isn't any mystery about it and there isn't anything special about the kid himself.

darstec

You just moved the goal posts. Besides, it is you that wants to find something special about messiahship. You explicitly said: and I showed that not only was the term messiah/christos used for David, it was also used for King Saul, Aaron's sons, other priests, bread (and could have shown the same of pillars, hills and donkeys). Why do you think Joshua, the anointed of the NT was a special case?

And if he wasn't a special case, why the need for a special birth? You are reading later ideas into earlier texts which is why the Gnostics disagreed with those proponents of what is now orthodoxy, and why they had to be eliminated.

spin

What really needs to be said when you refuse to read what I wrote for what it says and for not dealing with the significance of the essential term?


So what? It shows that you don't understand a basic philological term.

I'll admit you have tried to make this whacky analogy work for quite a while. It simply shows that you have no interest in either the text or context of the passages being analysed in each case.

Why don't you buy a book about comparative linguistics? You need one.

Rabbinical usage of a term must be considered along with all the other indications, such as the cognates and the other biblical uses. These are quite illuminating, but you are too tunnelled into your outcome to do the work necessary to analyse the language.

This doesn't answer the question posed to you. (Besides, the translator's use of parQenos matches that of the rest of the Hebrew bible, which involves both N(R and (LMH as well as BTWLH.)

You missed the reference.


spin