Great read! (Go Team Shlomo!) How does a Christian square the post-Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, exactly? A part of yesterday’s haftarah was Isaiah 66:23, which describes a post-Messianic world where *everyone* (“all flesh”) has a specific, personal worship of God.
So why are there still non-Christians around? Why didn’t any of the other God’s Kingdom crap happen? I guess I’ve never really understood why there’s supposed to be a second coming—doesn’t that pretty directly conflict with the prophecies?
There are parts of Isaiah 53 that are written in the past tense, and parts that are written in the future tense. Given this, it's really weird to imagine it's actually all a prophecy about a singular figure in the future, rather than partially being a prophecy about the future and partially being a description of the past (relative to the author's time). And the parts that Christians think they can get non-Christians to admit resemble Jesus' story are almost precisely those parts written in past tense. The tense makes those parts more plausibly read to be about events that transpired before the author had composed the poem, i.e., the historical nation of Israel's degradation and destruction.
The only way to make the tense stuff work out is if we imagine the author wanted the poem to be read in the voice of some fictional person living centuries into the future of the author's own time, but not *too* far into the future. And there's no internal hint of any of this.
Regarding Shlomo's argument about Isaiah 53:5: sure, that's another way to read that HALF of the verse. But how do you read what follows: that "the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." Does that not push one towards the position that it is on our behalf?
To my knowledge, Isaiah 40-55 is usually considered as one author, and there are passages in there that clearly describe Israel as having transgressed.
Does Shlomo ever address the parts that make it clear that he dies (v. 8-9)?
As to things being about a servant: I'm also not quite sure what to make of the early verses of Isaiah 49: that reads best to me as talking about someone being raised up to restore Israel, who is also counted, in some sense, as being Israel. But perhaps the other reading would be raising up some people to be Israel, who will then bring back the rest of Israel?
"The KJV translated it that way, so therefore translating it more literally is incompatible with Christianity" is not a very good argument. For a simple disproof, there exist translations by Christians (e.g. the NET) which do not translate the perfect verb into a present. Keep in mind that Christians would read this as from a future point in time looking back on Christ's suffering, etc. While, sure, strictly speaking Christians haven't all been healed individually yet, there's clearly past work that's been accomplished as a means to our healing which would warrant the use of the perfect there. This becomes even less of a problem, I would think, when you recognize that the Hebrew expression is less direct: "there has been healing for us," or so.
I wasn't objecting to speaking of a nation in a singular. That happens frequently.
I think your rendition of healing is bad in particular, given that healing seems inherently to be talking about the fixing of harms, whereas you seem to intend it to refer to nations not being punished because of Israel being punished—that is, the lack, not the reparation, of a harm. (I'd be interested to hear what you take the meaning of the passage in general, to be, as well: is Israel being offered as a sin offering? Why? What does that mean?)
Regarding death, I would suggest that the conjunction of being "cut off from the land of the living" immediately followed by speaking of graves and tombs would indicate actual death. (I still have no idea why you cited psalm 116.)
Regarding the first reading: how natural is this? I would have assumed that with the bet preposition that that would ordinarily be expressing an instrument or means or something there. (But you surely know Hebrew much better than I do.) Likewise, "Chastisement of our peace" doesn't read most naturally as just a contrast.
Regarding the second reading: I don't know that I see that immediately from Zechariah there. And I would wonder if Isaiah 19 would be evidence against that, where you see a simultaneous blessing with reference also to Egypt and Assyria. I do think that this handles the Hebrew better than the previous rendering, I just don't think it's true.
Regarding your third reading: I think that that can handle that verse pretty well, but I don't think that framing handles the passage well. If the idea is that we are looking from the perspective of the other nations, and what they think to be true (rather than what is in fact true), well, they certainly didn't think that e.g. there wasn't any deceit in the mouth of the Jews. I also think other parts of the passage "the lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all" don't fit their view—while they might think that they ought to pressure conversions, etc. and not make life all that nice for the Jews, and may even have thought that acting faithfully, including in that, might correspond with national success, I don't think there was really a theology of substitutionary atonement there, which is what I would read the passage to require.
The phrase "land of the living" appears in Job 28. I know have speculated that he was an Edomite, and so not in Canaan. But I wouldn't depend on that, as that's pretty speculative. Jeremiah 11:19 looks like it's about death, as do some others. But some you could probably read as about the land, if you wanted to. (As in some other psalms of David.)
(Also, thanks for this conversation. I haven't really had the opportunity before to discuss this sort of thing before with a Jew—or, well, I suppose I could have asked the ones I know, but I haven't.)
As a side note: I know it's a Jewish thing to write "G-d"—why? I understand that there's a taboo on the tetragrammaton in Hebrew, but I don't see why that would carry over.
Like most of the other people replying, I definitely side with Schlomo here - even if you accept the concept of dual fulfillment, it seems bizarre for God to have two totally distinct referents with opposing features represented by the same figure. But also, it's worth pointing out that many of the features Christians identify as obviously pointing to Jesus are precisely the sorts of small details that early Christian authors would have the ability to alter in their testimonies. People make a big deal about Jesus not speaking during his crucifixion, for example, but even the Gospels themselves disagree about that and it would not be hard forty years after the fact to realize what the Isaiah prophecy says and decide to retrofit your story to that model. That alone should make us skeptical of any claims about just how accurate the prophecy is as a whole.
As someone who is neither Christian nor Jewish, I do think that the traditional Christian interpretation is more faithful to the biblical story than the traditional Jewish one.
Verse 7 is very interesting in this context: "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth"
Israel of the time was anything but silent. Take Jeremiah 25:1-9 for example. The people of Israel were not silent as a sheep before its shearers. They wouldn't even listen to Jeremiah.
Or take Jeremiah 36. Israelites of the time seized the scroll from Baruch and destroyed it. That's not exactly the image of a silent sheep, at least the way I see it.
i love this post. I love the fact that it shows Christians (especially the right-wing ones) that their interpretation of Jesus verses isn't the only plausible one. This is precisely why philosophy and theology should be helpful and this is where universalism (universal salvation) view comes in handy!
Yes! We need a reliable method of interpreting the Old Testament in order to really understand the claims. I think the starting point of these discussions is to lay out the reasons for thinking any particular method of interpretation is the right one.
Great read! (Go Team Shlomo!) How does a Christian square the post-Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, exactly? A part of yesterday’s haftarah was Isaiah 66:23, which describes a post-Messianic world where *everyone* (“all flesh”) has a specific, personal worship of God.
So why are there still non-Christians around? Why didn’t any of the other God’s Kingdom crap happen? I guess I’ve never really understood why there’s supposed to be a second coming—doesn’t that pretty directly conflict with the prophecies?
Pedantic jibberish based upon a faulty understanding of prophets.
Prophets are forth-tellers (interpreters) and not fore-tellers (clairvoinant futurists).
Just pointing out that Pierced is an intentional mistranslation for wounded to make it match the crucification more.
There are parts of Isaiah 53 that are written in the past tense, and parts that are written in the future tense. Given this, it's really weird to imagine it's actually all a prophecy about a singular figure in the future, rather than partially being a prophecy about the future and partially being a description of the past (relative to the author's time). And the parts that Christians think they can get non-Christians to admit resemble Jesus' story are almost precisely those parts written in past tense. The tense makes those parts more plausibly read to be about events that transpired before the author had composed the poem, i.e., the historical nation of Israel's degradation and destruction.
The only way to make the tense stuff work out is if we imagine the author wanted the poem to be read in the voice of some fictional person living centuries into the future of the author's own time, but not *too* far into the future. And there's no internal hint of any of this.
Regarding Shlomo's argument about Isaiah 53:5: sure, that's another way to read that HALF of the verse. But how do you read what follows: that "the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed." Does that not push one towards the position that it is on our behalf?
To my knowledge, Isaiah 40-55 is usually considered as one author, and there are passages in there that clearly describe Israel as having transgressed.
Does Shlomo ever address the parts that make it clear that he dies (v. 8-9)?
As to things being about a servant: I'm also not quite sure what to make of the early verses of Isaiah 49: that reads best to me as talking about someone being raised up to restore Israel, who is also counted, in some sense, as being Israel. But perhaps the other reading would be raising up some people to be Israel, who will then bring back the rest of Israel?
Are you aware of the meaning of stripe which would be close to bruises?
But sure, I don't think the tense there would affect the Christian reading.
I don't find your reading of healed there terribly plausible. Healing is more than not undergoing punishment.
Psalm 116:9, in light of the preceding verse, seems more just to speak of being alive.
"The KJV translated it that way, so therefore translating it more literally is incompatible with Christianity" is not a very good argument. For a simple disproof, there exist translations by Christians (e.g. the NET) which do not translate the perfect verb into a present. Keep in mind that Christians would read this as from a future point in time looking back on Christ's suffering, etc. While, sure, strictly speaking Christians haven't all been healed individually yet, there's clearly past work that's been accomplished as a means to our healing which would warrant the use of the perfect there. This becomes even less of a problem, I would think, when you recognize that the Hebrew expression is less direct: "there has been healing for us," or so.
I wasn't objecting to speaking of a nation in a singular. That happens frequently.
I think your rendition of healing is bad in particular, given that healing seems inherently to be talking about the fixing of harms, whereas you seem to intend it to refer to nations not being punished because of Israel being punished—that is, the lack, not the reparation, of a harm. (I'd be interested to hear what you take the meaning of the passage in general, to be, as well: is Israel being offered as a sin offering? Why? What does that mean?)
Regarding death, I would suggest that the conjunction of being "cut off from the land of the living" immediately followed by speaking of graves and tombs would indicate actual death. (I still have no idea why you cited psalm 116.)
Regarding the first reading: how natural is this? I would have assumed that with the bet preposition that that would ordinarily be expressing an instrument or means or something there. (But you surely know Hebrew much better than I do.) Likewise, "Chastisement of our peace" doesn't read most naturally as just a contrast.
Regarding the second reading: I don't know that I see that immediately from Zechariah there. And I would wonder if Isaiah 19 would be evidence against that, where you see a simultaneous blessing with reference also to Egypt and Assyria. I do think that this handles the Hebrew better than the previous rendering, I just don't think it's true.
Regarding your third reading: I think that that can handle that verse pretty well, but I don't think that framing handles the passage well. If the idea is that we are looking from the perspective of the other nations, and what they think to be true (rather than what is in fact true), well, they certainly didn't think that e.g. there wasn't any deceit in the mouth of the Jews. I also think other parts of the passage "the lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all" don't fit their view—while they might think that they ought to pressure conversions, etc. and not make life all that nice for the Jews, and may even have thought that acting faithfully, including in that, might correspond with national success, I don't think there was really a theology of substitutionary atonement there, which is what I would read the passage to require.
The phrase "land of the living" appears in Job 28. I know have speculated that he was an Edomite, and so not in Canaan. But I wouldn't depend on that, as that's pretty speculative. Jeremiah 11:19 looks like it's about death, as do some others. But some you could probably read as about the land, if you wanted to. (As in some other psalms of David.)
(Also, thanks for this conversation. I haven't really had the opportunity before to discuss this sort of thing before with a Jew—or, well, I suppose I could have asked the ones I know, but I haven't.)
As a side note: I know it's a Jewish thing to write "G-d"—why? I understand that there's a taboo on the tetragrammaton in Hebrew, but I don't see why that would carry over.
I strongly recommend you read The Real Messiah? by Aryeh Kaplan. He demolishes Christian arguments completely.
https://amzn.to/41DCsXJ
I couldn't even read all that, but I really enjoyed the idea of Bentham's Bulldog doing this!
Like most of the other people replying, I definitely side with Schlomo here - even if you accept the concept of dual fulfillment, it seems bizarre for God to have two totally distinct referents with opposing features represented by the same figure. But also, it's worth pointing out that many of the features Christians identify as obviously pointing to Jesus are precisely the sorts of small details that early Christian authors would have the ability to alter in their testimonies. People make a big deal about Jesus not speaking during his crucifixion, for example, but even the Gospels themselves disagree about that and it would not be hard forty years after the fact to realize what the Isaiah prophecy says and decide to retrofit your story to that model. That alone should make us skeptical of any claims about just how accurate the prophecy is as a whole.
As someone who is neither Christian nor Jewish, I do think that the traditional Christian interpretation is more faithful to the biblical story than the traditional Jewish one.
Verse 7 is very interesting in this context: "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth"
Israel of the time was anything but silent. Take Jeremiah 25:1-9 for example. The people of Israel were not silent as a sheep before its shearers. They wouldn't even listen to Jeremiah.
Or take Jeremiah 36. Israelites of the time seized the scroll from Baruch and destroyed it. That's not exactly the image of a silent sheep, at least the way I see it.
i love this post. I love the fact that it shows Christians (especially the right-wing ones) that their interpretation of Jesus verses isn't the only plausible one. This is precisely why philosophy and theology should be helpful and this is where universalism (universal salvation) view comes in handy!
Yes! We need a reliable method of interpreting the Old Testament in order to really understand the claims. I think the starting point of these discussions is to lay out the reasons for thinking any particular method of interpretation is the right one.
Typo: inequities -> iniquities.
!!!Conversion imminent!!!
Conversion to Judaism?