04-04-2024, 01:02 AM
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.
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.