Who buried with whom? Isaiah 53:9

[searchinmyroots]

Thomas,

You are correct, referring to something not being there isn't a very good argument so I retract those.

But the rest still stand.

I said -

"The servant is referred to in the plural several times"


Your reply -

Not in Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12"



That reply in itself is enough for me to end my part of this discussion.



Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.

[ThomasDGW]

Thomas,

You are correct, referring to something not being there isn't a very good argument so I retract those.

But the rest still stand.

I said -

"The servant is referred to in the plural several times"


Your reply -

Not in Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12"



That reply in itself is enough for me to end my part of this discussion.



Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.

I appreciate your willingness to retract some arguments.

I think that the counter-missionaries should state more clearly that they will not accept the change of identity of the servant of God in any place in Isaiah, so that there can be only one servant of God spoken of in Isaiah: the nation of Israel.  They should also state why they believe that, then clarify that it doesn't really matter to them what a particular passage says that the servant of God will do or did, he is always the nation of Israel. Thus, the only task for these scholars is to develop explanations of how the nation of Israel did or will do those things.

If they would state this, there would be no need for all of the discussion, in which the counter-missionaries pretend that the identity of the servant in the section 52:13-53:12 is partly based on the things the servant is said to do, like being buried with the wicked, bearing sin, being wounded to heal transgressors, etc. But, they want to pretend that this is true so they can lead defenders of Christianity and the NT into arguments of "Did Jesus really do these things?" Having convinced some that he did not really do one or more of those things, then they can press them to reject Jesus as a candidate. Then they can steer those Jews back into the fold of rabbinical Judaism, and they hope that the deconverted won't notice that the nation of Israel really doesn't do those things, either, according to the standard that they insisted on for Jesus.

Ironically, what the counter-missionaries pretend that matters to them, as they seek to draw away followers from Jesus, really does matter. The servant of God really needs to do or have done all the things that they say are stated in Isaiah 53. The nation of Israel cannot do them. On judgment day, we will find that only one man will have done them. And the counter-missionaries are going to be in big trouble with God, because they insisted that people apply meanings of Isaiah's prophecy that they do not themselves believe. That is called "bearing false witness against your neighbor."

Christians often correctly quote the NT to say that if you don't come to the Father through Jesus, you will be lost, but the error is to understand that to mean that a Jew who faithfully observes the Torah and the prophets will still be lost if he simply fails to believe in Jesus. This is not quite true. You will be lost because you did not follow Psalm 119:42 "And I shall answer a word to those who disgrace me, for I trusted in Your word." Instead you counter-missionaries have done what Hananiah did, as Jeremiah 28:15 records: "you assured this people with a lie." I can see clearly that the reason that most Jews do not believe in Jesus is that they do not trust their own prophets.

[searchinmyroots]

Thomas,

You are correct, referring to something not being there isn't a very good argument so I retract those.

But the rest still stand.

I said -

"The servant is referred to in the plural several times"


Your reply -

Not in Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12"



That reply in itself is enough for me to end my part of this discussion.



Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.

I appreciate your willingness to retract some arguments.

I see you totally ignored the plural part.

I only retract those statements as they refer to the servant in Isaiah 53.

As for the rest of the Hebrew bible......................................................

Please don't tell us your version of judgement day, we know what G-d expects of us according to the Hebrew bible and it has nothing to do with believing in a messiah for the Christian meaning of salvation.

It tells us what is required of us and Ecclesiastes 12 explains it very clearly, not hidden in what if's or maybes -
13 - The end of the matter, everything having been heard, fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the entire man.

Meaning when you have heard everything, this is what counts, fear G-d and keep His commandments. That is the whole of man.

14 - For every deed God will bring to judgment-for every hidden thing, whether good or bad.

And G-d will judge us by our deeds, we won't be able to hide anything.

The Hebrew bible tells us not to listen to anything else.

You're really not any different than others who try to convert us, you just have a different approach.

[searchinmyroots]

And as G-d would have it, this popped up in my feed this morning.

As I stated previously, one verse doesn't tell the whole story. Look at the big picture.

[ThomasDGW]

I did not ignore the plural part. My answer is that a plural servant in one section does not automatically mean that this plural servant applies to other mentions of God's servant. The servant's identity can change.

I didn't tell you "my version" of judgment day, I reminded you of your version, (which is really the same as my version) the one in which you will be judged by your obedience or disobedience to the Torah, and everything hidden will be revealed.  You apparently read everything I say through a distorting lens, because I did not say anything about "believing in a messiah for the Christian meaning of salvation." In my last paragraph, I said that those who don't believe in Jesus don't trust the Hebrew prophets. On the judgment day, you will be judged for not following your prophets whom you affirm are from God, NOT for not believing in Jesus. But, believing in Jesus, or not, is a present test to see if you really follow Moses, or Isaiah, or Zechariah, to see if you really fear God and keep His commandments.

For example, Isaiah 53 speaks of someone bearing sins. A Jew who says, "I don't need a sin bearer. All I have to do is approach God, and God will forgive my sins," is disregarding their prophet.

You keep accusing me of pushing the Christian meaning of salvation. Let me tell you something. Christian theologians don't accuse me of that. I used to think that I believed in the Christian meaning of salvation, but when I stopped accepting the interpretations of Christianity imposed on the NT, I radically changed my understanding. The NT teaches that the salvation of Jesus is an act of writing the Torah on the heart, exactly as Jeremiah 31:31-34 said. So, a person who receives the salvation/new covenant of Jesus is going to judgment day as a Torah observer, who loved God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself.  There are more details, but none can contradict this.

A Jew who says, "I don't need God to write the Torah on my heart. I can do that myself," is disregarding their prophet.

The Christianity version of salvation is that a person who believes in Jesus gets Jesus' sacrifice accounted to him as a payment of the death penalty for sin, so that he is still a sinner who does not follow the Torah, but all his sins are filtered out through the blood of Jesus, so he will not come to the original version of judgment day, but another version in which he will be recognized to be a sinner, but because he believed in Jesus, "the death of Jesus serves as his paid penalty," so he gets eternal life. I completely reject this version of salvation, and I am not trying to convert anyone to it.

[ThomasDGW]

The parallelism that Yosef points out in the video is truly amazing. I never before noticed the shift from one subject to another and then the shift back to the same. It either shows how dense I am, or how smart the rabbis are. Well actually, I did notice the return to the servant bearing our sins from a similar subject in the first part, but I never followed that through further. It is one more evidence that this book was not made up by a man.

Nevertheless, Yosef is in a dangerous trap, and it is the same one that I was in when I was influenced by my teachers, who followed their teachers, etc.

Take his first example of parallelism from Isaiah 2:3 "... out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem" I can see the poetic parallelism, and it seems to be two ways of saying almost the same thing, maybe basically the same thing. However, it would be a mistake to say that this means that Zion means Jerusalem and the law is a synonym for God's word. We know from other sources than this verse that Jerusalem includes Zion and God's word includes the law, but they are not synonyms. He didn't make this mistake here (and would not make it here), but later he advocated for doing a similar thing in Isaiah 52-54.

Therefore, when he notes the chiastic parallelism happening in Isaiah 52-54, he is making a dangerous error to be saying, for example, that when the subject shifts from the servant's children in Isaiah 53 back to Jerusalem's children in Isaiah 54, then that means that the servant's children are exactly the children of Jerusalem, the children of Israel, hence the servant is Israel.

Guess what! That is exactly what Christian scholars do with the NT! That is exactly what caused me so much grief as I realized that my hope of salvation, as offered by Christianity, was wrong: because they used parallel statements to tell me that two things are synonyms! When I finally dropped those scholarly devices, and just read what the text said (wow, that was hard at first) only then did things become crystal clear, then I found that the Hebrew Bible said the same things I discovered in the NT, again reading just what it said. I didn't invent it. I was surprised when I saw it.

This Yosef seems like a fine chap, and his reading of Isaiah was moving to me (I really love the prophets), but don't expect me to follow him down the same rabbit hole I escaped from those many years ago.

I noticed two things further. One is that when he explains in English what the Hebrew is saying, it is the same as I have available to me in my resources. In fact, I grabbed my New King James translation that I often use (not because it is the most accurate, but because it is pretty close to the consensus readings and it flows well in modern English) to follow along and much of what he read in English was word-for-word the same as the NKJ Version. So Yosef was "reading a Christian Bible" Ha! Anyway, he didn't tell me anything new that I had not read in the text myself, just pointed out things I had not noticed. I am tired of being accused of having a slanted version of the Bible, that I am "doomed" to not understanding because I don't read the original Hebrew.

Second, he states that the servant in Isaiah 52:13 is not explicitly identified. I knew that, but when I stated that in my thread here, I was castigated for it. "Two Jews, three opinions," is not an excuse to unjustly tell someone that they are messed up, while hiding that the person is actually stating what other Jewish scholars say.

[searchinmyroots]

Looks like you got it all figured out on your end Thomas.