Covenant made, covenant enforced: reading the law and the prophets

Two verses, one after the other, in Leviticus 19. Both in the NET.¹

18 You must not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you must love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

19 You must keep my statutes. You must not allow two different kinds of your animals to breed together, you must not sow your field with two different kinds of seed, and you must not wear a garment made of two different kinds of material.

Jesus called the first of these the second greatest commandment. Paul said the whole law is summed up in it. You probably own a cotton-polyester shirt that breaks the second.

Most people handle this by instinct. They keep verse 18 because it sounds like God and drop verse 19 because it sounds like an ancient farming manual, and they don't ask what rule they just used. That instinct is what this lesson is about. Applied to a different pair of verses, it's how people end up quoting Leviticus at their neighbours over shrimp, and how the neighbours end up deciding the whole book is nonsense.

There's a better way to read these verses, and it starts with a question that sounds too simple: what kind of document is the law in?

The answer turns out to answer a second question that looks unrelated. Why do the prophets, who take up so much of the Old Testament, sound the way they do? Law and prophets are two halves of one thing, and neither reads well without the other. So we'll take them together.

What the law is

Open Exodus 19. Israel has just come out of Egypt and is camped at Sinai. Before a single law is given, God says what the relationship is (19:4 to 6, NET):⁷

'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I lifted you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. And now, if you will diligently listen to me and keep my covenant, then you will be my special possession out of all the nations, for all the earth is mine, and you will be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.'

Then the people say yes. Then, and only then, come the commandments.

That order matters. The commandments of Exodus 20 to 23, and the much longer body of law in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, aren't a free-floating code of ethics dropped from the sky. They're the terms of an agreement between two named parties. Fee and Stuart's chapter on the law is subtitled "Covenant Stipulations for Israel", and that phrase answers most of what Leviticus raises.²

The shape of a treaty

The ancient world helps here. Scholars in the 1950s, George Mendenhall first among them, noticed that the Sinai covenant is laid out like the treaties Hittite kings made with their vassals between about 1500 and 1200 BC.⁵⁶ Christine Hayes, who taught the Hebrew Bible at Yale, walks through the form in her lecture on Exodus. The treaties have six parts, and her wording is worth keeping.⁶

1. A preamble: "The suzerain identifies himself."
2. "Some kind of historical prologue": what the great king has done for the vassal.
3. "Some sort of set of stipulations and requirements, upon the vassal generally."
4. Arrangements "for the publication of the treaty, or its deposition, its safe-keeping in some sort of shrine."
5. "A concluding invocation of witnesses, usually the gods."
6. "A list of blessings for the party who obeys, and curses for the party that violates the pact."

Now watch the Bible do the same things. Exodus 20 opens with the LORD naming himself and what he did: he brought them out of Egypt, which is preamble and prologue in one sentence. The commandments follow, which are the stipulations. Deuteronomy 31 has Moses write the law down and hand it to the priests to be read aloud to all Israel every seven years, which is deposit and publication. Deuteronomy 30:19, in the NET: "Today I invoke heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!"⁷ There are the witnesses, and there is the blessing and curse. Deuteronomy 28 spells that last part out at length, and we'll come back to it, because the prophets never stopped using it.

One thing to notice about where those last pieces come from. Deuteronomy isn't a second copy of Exodus 20; it's a renewal document, delivered forty years later on the plains of Moab, and it says so itself. Deuteronomy 29:1, in the NET: "These are the words of the covenant that the Lord commanded Moses to make with the people of Israel in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant he had made with them at Horeb."⁷ That's why Deuteronomy is where the treaty form is fullest. A renewal is the occasion when you read the whole agreement out again.

Hayes is careful, and so should we be: "no one passage contains all of the elements of the Hittite treaty form", but "there are enough of them scattered around to suggest it as a model."⁶ That's the honest strength of the claim: the form isn't exact, but it is recognisable.

And there's a live argument about which treaties are the closest match, which matters more than it looks. Mendenhall's parallels were second-millennium Hittite. Later scholars, Moshe Weinfeld and Hans Ulrich Steymans among them, argued that the closest parallels to Deuteronomy 28's curse section in particular are first-millennium Assyrian, above all the succession treaty of Esarhaddon in the seventh century BC, and others point to the Aramaic Sefire treaties.²⁸ The question is still argued, in evangelical journals as much as anywhere. It bears on dating, because a second-millennium form suits an early covenant and a seventh-century one suits a later composition, which is why the argument is warm. What both sides agree on is the thing this lesson needs: Israel's covenant is written in the shape of an ancient treaty, and that's the genre you are reading.

Look at the tablet above before you read on. That object, or something like it, is what a first hearer of Exodus 19 had in mind for the kind of thing being made. Not a rulebook. A treaty.

Why does the form matter for reading? Because a stipulation only means something inside its treaty. Take the parapet law in Deuteronomy 22:8, or the two-kinds-of-cloth law in Leviticus 19:19, out of the covenant and you have a strange rule. Put it back in and you have a term in a relationship: this is how the people the LORD carried out of Egypt were to live in his land, so that they'd look like his people and not like the nations around them. Whether it applies to you is a separate question, and we're about to reach it. But you can't ask that question well until you know that the law isn't a list of timeless rules. It's the terms of a covenant made with Israel at Sinai.

How a Christian reads it now

So the law is the terms of a covenant made with Israel. You are (probably) not an Israelite at Sinai. What, then, is the law to you?

Christians have never had one answer, and I'd rather show you the range than hand you one view as if the others didn't exist. What every serious answer agrees on is that the question is real: Jesus said "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17, NET),⁹ and the same New Testament says, in a parenthesis at Mark 7:19, "This means all foods are clean" (NET).⁹ Any account of the law has to hold both sentences.

Proposal 1: three kinds of law

The oldest Christian tool, and the one most readers have met without being told its name, is to sort the law into three kinds. Thomas Aquinas set it out in the thirteenth century: "We must therefore distinguish three kinds of precept in the Old Law; viz. 'moral' precepts... 'ceremonial' precepts... and 'judicial' precepts, which are determinations of the justice to be maintained among men."¹⁰

This isn't a Protestant instrument with a medieval provenance, which is how it often gets described. It is taught now, across the traditions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the Old Law "the first stage of revealed Law" and says "its moral prescriptions are summed up in the Ten Commandments" (1962), placing it as preparation for Christ rather than as a discarded system.²⁹ The Church of England's Article VII of the Thirty-Nine Articles states the same division in a confession: the law "as touching Ceremonies and Rites" doesn't bind Christians, nor need the "Civil precepts" be received in any commonwealth, "yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral."³⁰ And the Westminster Confession of 1646, the standard of Presbyterian churches, uses the same three drawers: the ceremonial laws are "now abrogated under the New Testament"; the judicial laws given to Israel "as a body politic" expired with that state and bind others only so far as their "general equity" requires; the moral law "does forever bind all".¹¹

It's a strong tool. Its weakness is one its defenders admit: the text of Leviticus doesn't come with those labels. Leviticus 19 mixes "love your neighbour" with "don't mix your cloth" in adjacent verses and calls both "my statutes". The sorting is something the reader brings, on principle, and the principle has to be argued.

Alongside it, and often inside it, sits the Lutheran way of putting the question, which asks less what a law is than what it does. The Formula of Concord (1577) names three uses: the law restrains open wrongdoing in society, it shows a person their sin and drives them to Christ, and it gives the believer a rule for living.³¹ A Lutheran reading Leviticus 19:19 doesn't first ask which drawer it goes in; they ask which of those three things it's doing to the reader now. That's a different question, and it's worth having in hand.

Proposal 2: what the new covenant renews

Fee and Stuart take a different route.² The old covenant, they say, was made with Israel, and it isn't the covenant Christians are under; Jeremiah 31 promised a new one, and the New Testament says it has come. So the working test is: has this stipulation been renewed in the new covenant? Where it has (love of neighbour: Galatians 5:14 quotes Leviticus 19:18 and says "the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment"),⁹ it binds as command. Where it hasn't (the food laws: Mark 7:19), it doesn't bind as command. And then the half people forget: all of it is still God's word to us. Nothing in the Old Testament is deleted. It's all Scripture, all teaching, all evidence of who God is and what he cares about; it's just not all commandment to us.

This proposal is cleaner than the first, and its weakness is the mirror image. To run the test you need the whole New Testament in your head, and there are laws the New Testament never mentions at all. What does "renewed" mean for the parapet in Deuteronomy 22:8? Fee and Stuart would say: the command isn't renewed, the concern behind it is.

Behind both: two frameworks and the space between

Under the two proposals sit two larger ways of relating the whole Old Testament to the whole New, and they produce different reading habits. I'll give each in its own terms, because a person who holds it should recognise it.¹²

Covenant theology reads the Bible as one covenant of grace unfolding through history. The New Testament interprets the Old; promises to Israel find their fulfilment in Christ and in the church, which is the Israel of God; the law is one administration of that single covenant, and its moral core continues. The Westminster Confession is this tradition's classic statement.

Dispensationalism reads Israel and the church as distinct peoples in God's plan. Charles Ryrie's Dispensationalism names three essentials, and the order matters to how the system is argued: a consistently plain or literal reading of Scripture, which then yields a consistent distinction between Israel and the church, with the glory of God in the world as the purpose of history.¹³ On this reading, Old Testament promises made to Israel keep a literal future referent for Israel; the New Testament adds, but doesn't change what the Old Testament texts meant.

Between them sit two newer positions. Progressive covenantalism (Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 2012) argues that each covenant builds on the last and all find their end in Christ, without either a single covenant of grace or a permanent Israel-church distinction.¹⁴ Progressive dispensationalism (Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock, Progressive Dispensationalism, 1993) keeps a future for national Israel while allowing that the church already shares in the new covenant blessings now.¹⁵

We hold a view, and you should know where I stand, so I'll say it once and then get out of the way. We read the law the way Fee and Stuart do, as the terms of a covenant that isn't ours, all of it God's word and none of it deleted, with the threefold division as an older tool we respect and often use. Within the larger frameworks we sit nearer covenant theology than dispensationalism. A Christian may reasonably hold any of the four, and this course won't resolve it.

The Jewish reading: the law is the gift

One more reading, and it isn't a Christian one. For a Jewish reader the law isn't a problem to be sorted. It's the heart of the covenant and the gift at the centre of it. Psalm 19 is Israel's own voice on the matter, and it doesn't sound like someone describing a burden (Psalm 19:8, JPS 1917):²⁰

The law of the LORD is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.

The traditional count of the commandments belongs here too, and it's worth being accurate about it rather than admiring. Rabbi Simlai's saying in the Talmud gives 613, and Maimonides made the classic enumeration in his Sefer HaMitzvot.³⁴ But the number is not a settled inventory even inside the tradition: Nachmanides wrote critical notes on Maimonides' list, the Halakhot Gedolot counts differently, and Ibn Ezra doubted the figure was more than a preacher's round number. A large share of the 613 concern the Temple and its offerings and cannot be performed at all since it fell. And the working category in Jewish life isn't the list; it's halakhah, the law as worked out through the Oral Torah, which is what the Talmud's tractates are for.

Practice differs, too, and "a Jewish reader" is not one person. Orthodox Judaism holds the ritual commandments binding as halakhah; Conservative Judaism holds them binding while allowing the halakhic process to develop; Reform Judaism holds the ethical commandments binding and treats the ritual ones as a matter of choice and meaning rather than obligation.

When a Jewish reader hears a Christian ask "which of these do we still have to keep?", many will tell you it's the wrong question about the right book. This course says plainly: the Tanakh is a living Scripture read on its own terms by Jews today, and on those terms the Torah isn't a stage to be passed through but the way of life the covenant gives. We don't share that reading. We want you to be able to state it so that a Jewish reader would say, yes, that's what we believe.

Leviticus 19:18 and 19:19, sorted three ways

Back to the two verses. Let me run each proposal, honestly, including where it strains.

The threefold division. Verse 18 is moral: it's the second table of the Ten Commandments summed up, and Jesus repeats it, so it binds always. Verse 19 is ceremonial. The separation of kinds (animals, seeds, cloth) belongs with the laws that marked Israel off as holy, and those laws pointed to a holiness Christ has brought, so they're abrogated. Where it strains: the text gives no label. You have to decide that "don't mix cloth" is ceremonial, and the reasoning is that it looks like the purity laws rather than like the moral ones. The reasoning is good. It's still reasoning rather than reading.

Fee and Stuart's covenant test. Verse 18: renewed. Galatians 5:14, Romans 13:9, Matthew 22:39 and James 2:8 all repeat it as command. It binds.

The Jewish reading. Both verses are commandments, and in Orthodox practice both are kept; the mixed-kinds law is shaatnez, and observant Jews check garments for it. The question of sorting doesn't arise. What arises instead is study of how to keep them.

Notice what happened. Three readings, three different answers, and none of them was "keep the one that sounds nice". Each had a rule you could argue with. That's what you're after.

What a prophet was

Now the other half.

The prophetic books take up a large part of the Old Testament, and for most readers they're the hardest part, because they arrive with an expectation attached: a prophet is someone who predicts the future. Hold that expectation and Amos is baffling. Almost none of it looks like prediction, and what does look like prediction seems to be about Assyria.

Drop the expectation and start from the covenant. The prophets are the people God sent to enforce it. Hayes puts the basic distinction well: a prophet is someone "sent by God with a message, not someone who is consulted by a client to find out what God thinks."¹⁶ The message, over and over, is the covenant's own terms read back to the people who agreed to them. Fee and Stuart's chapter title says it in five words: "Enforcing the Covenant in Israel".²

Three things follow that change how you read.

The prophets spoke; the books are collections. Amos didn't sit down and write the book of Amos. He delivered oracles, spoken messages, over a period of years, and the book gathers them. Hayes calls the prophetic books "anthologies of oracles",¹⁶ and Fee and Stuart's instruction for the prophets is two words in capitals: "THINK ORACLES".² Read a prophetic book as a continuous argument and you'll be lost by chapter 3. Read it as a collection of separate speeches, each with its own occasion, and it opens.

They spoke to their own generation. Amos 1:1 dates him: in the reign of Uzziah in Judah and Jeroboam in Israel, which puts him in the eighth century BC, speaking to the northern kingdom.⁹ His hearers were alive. The charges concern their markets, their courts, their worship. Whatever else an oracle does, it did something first for the people standing in front of the prophet.

The sanctions were already written down somewhere. Deuteronomy 28 is a list of what happens to a covenant-keeping Israel and a much longer list of what happens to a covenant-breaking one. So when a prophet says drought is coming, he isn't looking into a crystal ball. He is reading the covenant's penalty clause aloud.

Amos, with the penalty clause open

This is the part I most want you to work out for yourself, so read the two lists before you read anything I say about them.

Deuteronomy 28:15, in the NET: "But if you ignore the Lord your God and are not careful to keep all his commandments and statutes I am giving you today, then all these curses will come upon you in full force."⁷ What follows, quoted from the NET, includes these:¹⁷

• 28:17: "Your basket and your mixing bowl will be cursed"
• 28:21: "The Lord will plague you with deadly diseases until he has completely removed you from the land you are about to possess"
• 28:22: "He will afflict you with weakness, fever, inflammation, infection, sword, blight, and mildew"
• 28:23 to 24: "The sky above your heads will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron. The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust"
• 28:38: "You will take much seed to the field but gather little harvest, because locusts will consume it"
• 28:41: "You will bear sons and daughters but not keep them, because they will be taken into captivity"
• 28:42: "Whirring locusts will take over every tree and all the produce of your soil"
• 28:48: "instead in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and poverty you will serve your enemies"

Now Amos 4:6 to 12. The oracle is a list of things that have already happened to Israel, in five units, each closed with the same refrain. Verse 6 begins: "But surely I gave you no food to eat in all your cities; you lacked food everywhere you lived. Still you did not come back to me."¹⁷ (The Hebrew idiom behind "no food to eat" is literally "cleanness of teeth", which means nothing to chew. Lesson 11 uses this verse for a different reason.) Then, still from the NET:¹⁷

• 4:7 to 8: "I withheld rain from you three months before the harvest... People from two or three cities staggered into one city to get water, but remained thirsty"
• 4:9: "I destroyed your crops with blight and disease. Locusts kept devouring your orchards, vineyards, fig trees, and olive trees"
• 4:10: "I sent against you a plague like one of the Egyptian plagues. I killed your young men with the sword"
• 4:11: "I overthrew some of you the way God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah"

And after each: "Still you did not come back to me."

Look at the last line of the chart, because it's the honest part. Nearly every item in Amos's list is in Deuteronomy 28's, and one is not. Amos 4:11's overthrow "the way God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah" has no counterpart in that chapter. It does have one a chapter later, at Deuteronomy 29:23, where the land is left like "the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim".⁷ Which tells you something worth more than a tidy match would have: what Amos has in his bones isn't one chapter but the covenant's whole sanctions tradition, and he moves through it freely.

What this argument assumes, and what it doesn't

I've been saying Amos reads the covenant's sanctions back to Israel. There's a question underneath that, and I'd rather you heard it from me than found it later.

Amos preached around 760 BC. On the majority view in universities, Deuteronomy reached something like its present form in the seventh century, a hundred years or more after him, which is one reason the book found in the Temple in 2 Kings 22 is usually identified with some form of it. On that view Amos cannot have been reading Deuteronomy 28, because it wasn't there yet, and the influence runs the other way or from a shared stock: both draw on covenant curses that were common property in the ancient Near East, which is exactly what the Assyrian and Aramaic parallels above suggest. On the conservative view, Deuteronomy is substantially Mosaic with later editorial updating, which is Longman and Dillard's phrase "essentially Mosaic" from lesson 2, and Amos had the book.²⁷

So: does this lesson's mechanism need the conservative dating? The strong form does. "Amos held a scroll of Deuteronomy" assumes it. The working form doesn't, and the working form is what I've argued: Israel's covenant carried a known set of sanctions, Amos names them one after another, and his hearers recognised them as the terms they were under. That's visible in the texts themselves whichever century you date the book to, and it's what makes "prophecy means prediction" collapse. What you'd lose on the critical dating is the neatness, not the argument.

Lesson 10 takes the authorship question up properly, with the evidence on both sides. I'm flagging it here because the alternative is to let you build a habit on an assumption nobody told you about, and this course sorts its claims out loud. That the covenant carried sanctions and the prophets enforced them: established, and visible on the page. That Amos had Deuteronomy 28 in the form we read it: argued, and this lesson doesn't need it.

The oracle everyone quotes

Amos 5:21 to 24, NET:¹

21 "I absolutely despise your festivals! I get no pleasure from your religious assemblies. 22 Even if you offer me burnt and grain offerings, I will not be satisfied; I will not look with favor on your peace offerings of fattened calves. 23 Take away from me your noisy songs; I don't want to hear the music of your stringed instruments. 24 Justice must flow like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up."

Read badly, this is a prediction: God is announcing that one day sacrifice and festival will be abolished and replaced by ethics. But Amos's hearers weren't being told about a future. They were being sued. The feasts and offerings are the feasts and offerings the covenant itself commanded (Leviticus 23 lists them), and the charge is that Israel is keeping the ritual clauses while breaking the ones about the poor, the courts and honest weights (Amos 2:6 to 8; 5:10 to 12; 8:4 to 6). Hayes reads it as "an attack on empty piety" offered "in accompaniment to social injustice".¹⁶ Verse 24 is the demand a verdict makes, not a forecast.

That much is the charge and the verdict. The full legal form, what scholars call the riv (the Hebrew word for a legal dispute), shows up more completely elsewhere, and it has four parts: summons, witnesses, charge, and verdict or sanction. Hayes locates the first formal riv in Hosea rather than Amos: Hosea, she says, "is now the first to couch his charge in the form of this formal riv, or lawsuit."¹⁸ Micah 6 has the fullest version, and it calls the mountains as witnesses. Keep those four parts; you'll use them twice below.

Two horizons

Lesson 3 gave you Fee and Stuart's basic rule: a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers. That rule is what the near horizon is. Every prophetic oracle has one: what it meant to the people who first heard it, in their own decade, with their own kings and enemies and harvests. Some oracles also have a far horizon, a fulfilment beyond that generation, which the New Testament writers find in Christ and his people.

The near horizon is always there and is always read first. The far horizon is sometimes there, is never the only meaning, and the New Testament is the Christian's guide to where it is.

That last sentence isn't enough to work with on its own, because the New Testament never quotes most of the prophets. So here are the three steps, which is what this lesson actually does on Isaiah 7 below:

1. Fix the near horizon from the text's own time markers. Who is being addressed, what crisis, what does the passage itself say will happen and by when? Isaiah 7:16 does this in one verse.
2. Ask whether a New Testament writer takes the passage up, and if so what pattern he reads in it. The apostles' pattern is that what God did once, in part, he does again, in full. That's a claim about God's way of working, and it's the engine of every fulfilment reading in the New Testament.
3. If no New Testament writer takes it up, the far horizon is not yours to assert. The honest answer is the near horizon plus the pattern, offered as a pattern. This is the step people skip, and skipping it is how a sermon ends up predicting an election from Zechariah.

The whole art is keeping both horizons in view and not letting either swallow the other. Let the far horizon swallow the near and you get "prophecy means prediction", with the prophet reduced to a man who didn't know what he was saying. Let the near swallow the far and Matthew's Gospel is simply wrong to quote Isaiah.

That second failure is worth naming, because a Christian should be able to see it in a critical scholar's reading and it's the mirror of the error this lesson exists to correct. If the apostles' fuller sense is ruled out in advance, then Matthew isn't interpreting Isaiah but misquoting him, and the whole New Testament use of the Old is a mistake. We think it's a reading, held by faith, with a pattern behind it. Saying that is how you say what history can establish and what it can't.

The next example is the hardest one I know. It's also the test: a reader in either tradition should find their own view here and recognise it.

Isaiah 7:14, near and far

First the near horizon, and you'll be surprised how much of it everyone agrees on.

The situation. Isaiah 7:1 dates the oracle: Ahaz is king of Judah; Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel have marched on Jerusalem.¹⁹ The year is about 734 BC. Assyria under Tiglath-Pileser is pressing on the whole region, Syria and Israel have allied against it, and, in Hayes's summary, "Judah refused to join the alliance... So in anger, Aram and Israel moved south and lay siege to Jerusalem."¹⁸ Ahaz is terrified (7:2). Isaiah is sent to him with his own son, whose name Shear-jashub means "a remnant will return", and the message, in Hayes's paraphrase of 7:4, is "be quiet and do not fear."¹⁸ The two kings, God says, will fail (7:7). Then the line that turns the chapter: "If your faith does not remain firm, then you will not remain secure" (7:9, NET).¹⁹

Ahaz is offered a sign and refuses one. So God gives one anyway. NET, verses 14 and 16, with verse 15 (on curds and honey) left out here for space:¹

14 For this reason the Lord himself will give you a confirming sign. Look, this young woman is about to conceive and will give birth to a son. You, young woman, will name him Immanuel.

16 Here is why this will be so: Before the child knows how to reject evil and choose what is right, the land whose two kings you fear will be desolate.

(Immanuel means God is with us.)

What the sign was for Ahaz. Read verse 16 slowly, because it fixes the near horizon. Before a child born now is old enough to know right from wrong, the two kingdoms Ahaz fears will be empty. That's a sign for Ahaz, in Ahaz's lifetime, about Ahaz's enemies. Isaiah 8 continues in the same key: the prophet fathers a son with another portentous name, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and before that child knows how to cry out "My father" or "My mother", the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off (8:3 to 4).¹⁹ At 8:18 Isaiah says, "Look, I and the sons whom the Lord has given me are reminders and object lessons in Israel."¹⁹ History establishes this much: the oracle was spoken into a specific crisis, it promised something Ahaz would see, and the children with the strange names were the object lessons.

The word. The Hebrew word for the mother is almah, and the English word a translator picks for it is most of the argument. The NET, which this course quotes throughout, has "young woman". So does the Jewish Publication Society's 1917 translation, which is the one we use when we're quoting the Tanakh as the Tanakh (Isaiah 7:14, JPS 1917):²⁰

Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Both read the conception as still ahead: "is about to conceive", "shall conceive". Many other English Bibles read "virgin" here instead, and lesson 11 comes back to that decision. The Greek translation of Isaiah made by Jewish scholars in the centuries before Jesus, the Septuagint, has parthenos, which in Greek normally means a virgin: in Brenton's English, "behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son."²¹ Matthew 1:23 quotes the Greek: "Look! The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel," which means "God with us".¹

Now the two readings, each in its own words.

The Jewish reading

I'll let the classic Jewish commentators speak, since they're on Sefaria for anyone to check. Rashi (eleventh century, France), on "the young woman": "My wife will conceive this year. This was the fourth year of Ahaz."²² The mother is Isaiah's own wife; the child is born in Ahaz's reign; the sign is that a girl who has never prophesied will be moved to give the child a prophetic name. Rashi also reads the Hebrew participle as future rather than present, which is worth noting, because it's the same reading the NET and JPS give.

Ibn Ezra (twelfth century, Spain) is blunter: "It is to me a matter of surprise that there are those who say the prophet here refers to Jesus, since the sign was given to Ahaz, and Jesus was born many years afterwards."²³ He too takes the child to be Isaiah's son, one of the children of 8:18, and takes the sign to be what the child would live through.

Radak (David Kimhi, twelfth to thirteenth century, Provence) reads almah as a word for a young woman who may or may not be a virgin, and takes the mother to be Ahaz's own wife, so that the child is a royal son, Hezekiah.²⁴

Three medieval Jewish readers, three candidate children, one shared point: the sign is for Ahaz, in Ahaz's day, and the Hebrew word doesn't say "virgin". This isn't a modern objection. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, written in the second century, puts it in the mouth of his Jewish interlocutor: "The Scripture has not, 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,' but, 'Behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son.'"²⁵ Justin was a Christian writing his own dialogue, so Trypho is his construction rather than a transcript; but no Christian invents an objection that nobody is making, and Trypho's candidate for the child is Hezekiah, which is Radak's. The reading has been stated in those terms for as long as there have been Christians to state it to.

A Jewish reader would add: Immanuel, "God is with us", is answered in the survival of Judah at 8:10, and the chapter needs no second fulfilment to make sense.

How a critical scholar reads it

Worth separating out, because it isn't the same thing as the Jewish reading even though it agrees with it about the near horizon. A historical-critical reader reaches that conclusion by a different route: the philology of almah, the Septuagint translators' habits, and the setting of the oracle in eighth-century politics. Hayes, teaching from that side, calls the Greek "a mistranslation of the word 'young woman' as 'virgin'."¹⁸ Rashi and Ibn Ezra are not making a philological judgement of that kind; they're reading inside a tradition that takes the verse as Scripture. Two different disciplines, one shared conclusion about Ahaz, and neither is a spokesperson for the other.

The Christian reading

We hold, with Matthew, that the verse also speaks of Jesus. The case as we'd make it has four parts, and there's more in it than "Matthew said so".

First, the near horizon is granted. Ahaz got a sign in his own lifetime; the apostles never denied it, and a Christian reading that denies it is reading badly.

Second, the Septuagint's parthenos is not a Christian invention. It's what Jewish translators chose before there were Christians, and Matthew quotes what he had.

Third, the text itself widens as it goes, and this is the argument conservative commentators lean on hardest. At 7:11 God tells Ahaz to ask for a sign, and the address is to Ahaz. At 7:13 Isaiah turns and says "Pay attention, family of David", and from there the "you" is the house of David rather than the king in front of him.¹⁹ So the sign at 7:14 is given to a dynasty, not only to a frightened man, and the promise attaches to David's line. Isaiah 9 then promises a child on David's throne whose titles no eighth-century prince bore.

Fourth, and this is the heart of it: the apostles read the Old Testament with a pattern. What God did once, in part, he does again, in full. Beale's observation, which readers across all four frameworks accept, is that the Old Testament writers didn't exhaustively grasp what they wrote, so a later fulfilment isn't a contradiction of the first one.²⁶ The apostles found the fuller sense in Isaiah 7 because they had met Jesus and read backwards.

That is a faith reading. It's not what the Hebrew obviously means, and Christians should stop claiming it is.

So here's the sort. History establishes the crisis of 734, the near-horizon sign, the Hebrew almah and the Greek parthenos, the shift of address at 7:13, and the fact that both readings are ancient. Scholars argue over which child Isaiah meant and whether the Septuagint's word choice reflects an older Jewish reading or a looser one. We hold by faith that Matthew read the verse truly, that the sign to Ahaz was the near horizon of a promise whose far horizon is the virgin birth of the one who is God with us. A Jewish reader should be able to read this section and say, yes, that is our reading and our reasons. A Christian should be able to say the same. If either can't, tell us.

What people get wrong

"Prophecy means prediction." Fee and Stuart's estimate is that under two percent of it is messianic and under one percent is about events still ahead of us.² The prophets announced what was coming, often and specifically. But they announced it as the covenant's sanction on the people in front of them. Prediction was the tool; enforcement was the job.

"Prophecy is a code to be decoded against the newspaper." A cousin of the last one and worth separating, because it survives in people who'd deny the first. It treats an oracle as a locked message whose real referent is an event its speaker knew nothing about, which makes the prophet's own generation irrelevant to his own words. The test is step 1 of the two-horizons method: if your reading has no near horizon at all, it isn't a reading of the oracle.

"The law was an unbearable burden the Jews groaned under, and Jesus freed them from it." This is probably the most common Christian belief about the Torah, and Psalm 19 is the shortest refutation: this is what someone in love sounds like. The New Testament's argument with the law isn't that it was a misery; Paul calls it holy, righteous and good. Say what you actually mean, which is usually something about justification, and don't smuggle in a picture of Jewish life that Jews don't recognise.

"The Old Testament God is wrath, the New Testament God is love." Two thousand words of covenant curses will tempt you toward this, so name it now. Exodus 34:6 has God describing himself as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loyal love; the most vivid warnings about judgement in the Bible are on the lips of Jesus. Marcion drew the wrath-and-love line in the second century and the church rejected it, which lesson 2 covered.

"The law is abolished, so the Old Testament is irrelevant." Jesus said he hadn't come to abolish the Law.⁹ Fee and Stuart's second half is the corrective: all of it remains God's word even where none of it remains our command.

"Christians are inconsistent for eating shellfish while quoting Leviticus 18." The honest answer is that every Christian tradition has a principled way of sorting, and you've now seen three. You can disagree with the principle. You can't say there isn't one. The sharper form of the objection, that the sorting is done to keep the laws people already wanted to keep, is a fair challenge to any particular reader, and the answer is to show your principle and apply it where it costs you.

"The Ten Commandments are obviously a different kind of law from the rest." They may well be, and three of the traditions above say so. But it isn't obvious, and it isn't marked in the text: Leviticus 19 calls "love your neighbour" and "don't mix your cloth" alike "my statutes". Treat the distinction as a conclusion you argue for, not a fact you read off the page. Quiz question 1 is built on the one commandment where this bites hardest.

"The prophets wrote books." They spoke oracles. The books are collections, which is why Isaiah 7 seems to change subject every ten verses. Read them as separate speeches with separate occasions.

"Isaiah 53 is obviously about Jesus." We hold that it is about Jesus. "Obviously" is a claim about the Hebrew that the Hebrew doesn't support on its own; Jewish tradition reads the servant as Israel with reasons from the text, and part of that same tradition reads him as the Messiah.²⁶²⁷ Say what you hold and why, not that everyone who differs is reading in bad faith.

Now do it yourself, on Amos, Micah, and four passages out of order

Now close the page and write down, from memory:

• the six parts of a treaty
• the chapter that holds the covenant's sanctions, and roughly how much longer the curses are than the blessings
• Fee and Stuart's two-word instruction for the prophets
• the four parts of a riv
• the Hebrew word and the Greek word in Isaiah 7:14, and who uses which
• the three kinds of claim this course sorts everything into

Then check against the lesson.

Connections

Lesson 2 gave you the covenants as the spine of the story; this lesson turned the Sinai covenant into the operating system for two whole genres. Lesson 3's basic rule, that a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers, is what the near horizon is, and you used it here on a prophet's own audience. Lesson 6 will need the covenant background for what Jesus meant by "the kingdom of God". Lesson 7 takes the far horizon further, where the New Testament reads the Old and Revelation draws on the prophets. Lesson 10 returns to who wrote the Pentateuch and when Deuteronomy took its present form, which is the question this lesson named above rather than left buried. And lesson 11 uses Isaiah 7:14 once more, as a translation decision, when you have to choose a Bible that says "virgin" or one that says "young woman" and know why.

Go deeper

• Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, chapters 9 and 10. The two chapters this lesson is built on, with more on the kinds of law (apodictic and casuistic) and the forms of oracle than there was room for here.
• Christine Hayes, Yale RLST 145, lectures 8, 16 and 17 (free video and transcripts at oyc.yale.edu). The treaty form, Amos, and Isaiah 7 taught by the historical-critical method rather than from a confession. Lecture 11, on biblical law, sets out the three legal collections inside the Pentateuch, which is the critical account of the law this lesson only gestured at.
• Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Radak on Isaiah 7:14 at Sefaria, in English, alongside the notes in The Jewish Study Bible (2nd ed., Oxford, 2014) for how Jewish scholars read the passage today rather than in the twelfth century. Twenty minutes with the primary sources beats any summary, including mine.
• Longman and Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament (2nd ed., Zondervan, 2006), the chapters on Deuteronomy, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah. If this lesson sent you into books you don't know, this is the one that gives you your bearings in each: who is speaking, when, to whom, and what the arguments about the book are.
• Köstenberger and Patterson, Invitation to Biblical Interpretation (2nd ed., Kregel, 2021), on the hermeneutical triad of history, literature and theology. This lesson used all three without naming them: the treaty world and 734 BC are history, the oracle and the lawsuit form are literature, and what the covenant is for is theology. The triad is a good check on your own reading of any passage.

Sources

1. NET Bible, 2nd ed. (Biblical Studies Press, 2019), netbible.org. Quoted as printed: Leviticus 19:18 to 19; Amos 5:21 to 24; Isaiah 7:14 and 7:16; Matthew 1:23; Hosea 4:1 to 3. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved. The NET is the course's default translation; see Editorial Standards 4.7. The edition matters at Isaiah 7:14: the first edition read "the sovereign master himself", the second reads "the Lord himself", and online editions of the NET are not all the second.
2. Fee, G. D. and Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), chapter 9, "The Law(s): Covenant Stipulations for Israel", and chapter 10, "The Prophets: Enforcing the Covenant in Israel". The law as covenant terms not renewed as command but all God's word; "THINK ORACLES"; the estimate "Less than 2 percent of Old Testament prophecy is messianic. Less than 5 percent specifically describes the new-covenant age. Less than 1 percent concerns events yet to come in our time", given without a source and quoted as their estimate.
3. Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 23b, read at Sefaria: Rabbi Simlai's teaching of 613 commandments, 365 prohibitions for the days of the solar year and 248 positive commandments for the limbs of the body.
4. Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvot (Book of Commandments), read at Sefaria; the classic enumeration of the 613, opening with belief in God from Exodus 20:2. The disputes over the enumeration (Nachmanides' critical notes, the Halakhot Gedolot's different count, Ibn Ezra's doubts) are standard in the literature on the topic and are given here without a page reference.
5. Mendenhall, G. E., "Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition", The Biblical Archaeologist 17, no. 3 (September 1954), 49 to 76. The original argument that the Sinai covenant follows the form of Hittite suzerainty treaties. The article itself was not opened; it is cited for the origin of the treaty-form argument, which is known here through Hayes's lecture.
6. Hayes, C., Yale Open Courses RLST 145, Lecture 8, "Exodus: From Egypt to Sinai" (2006), transcript at oyc.yale.edu. The six elements of the Hittite treaty form quoted in the text; "no one passage contains all of the elements", "enough of them scattered around to suggest it as a model"; the footnote identifying Mendenhall's work. Hayes retired in 2023 and is Sterling Professor Emerita.
7. NET: Exodus 19:4 to 6; Deuteronomy 28:15, 17, 21, 22, 23 to 24, 38, 41, 42, 48; Deuteronomy 29:1; Deuteronomy 29:23; Deuteronomy 30:19.
8. Wikimedia Commons, "Treaty of Kadesh.jpg", photograph by Iocanus (2009), CC BY 3.0; Museum of the Ancient Orient, Istanbul Archaeology Museums. The treaty date of about 1259 BC (Ramesses II's regnal year 21) is the mainstream figure; the Commons file description itself gives 1269 BC, and the difference is a matter of Egyptian chronology rather than of the object.
9. NET: Matthew 5:17; Mark 7:19; Galatians 5:14; Amos 1:1; Jeremiah 31:31 to 33; Exodus 34:6; Matthew 9:13 and 12:7 (Jesus quoting Hosea 6:6, "I want mercy and not sacrifice").
10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, question 99, article 4, "Whether, besides the moral and ceremonial precepts, there are also judicial precepts?", read at newadvent.org. The threefold distinction quoted; the ellipses drop his definitions of the moral and ceremonial precepts and keep his definition of the judicial.
11. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapter 19, "Of the Law of God", sections 3 to 5. Ceremonial laws "now abrogated, under the New Testament"; judicial laws given to Israel "as a body politic", which "expired together with the State of that people", obliging others only as "the general equity thereof may require"; "The moral law does forever bind all." Wording confirmed against the text at this lesson's Stage 4.
12. SOURCES.md for this course, contested question 5, which sets out covenant theology, dispensationalism, progressive covenantalism and progressive dispensationalism as a range to be presented without resolution.
13. Ryrie, C. C., Dispensationalism, revised and expanded ed. (Moody, 1995). The three essentials: a consistently literal hermeneutic, the resulting Israel-church distinction, and the glory of God in the world as the purpose of history. The book was not opened; the essentials are given as reported in several secondary summaries of it, and Ryrie's own ordering derives the second from the first.
14. Gentry, P. J. and Wellum, S. J., Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants (Crossway, 2012). Progressive covenantalism as a middle way. The book was not opened; the characterisation is from published reviews (Themelios, EFCA).
15. Blaising, C. A. and Bock, D. L., Progressive Dispensationalism (Victor/BridgePoint, 1993). The book was not opened; title, authors and date confirmed from publisher records, and the position is given as standardly summarised.
16. Hayes, C., RLST 145, Lecture 16, "Literary Prophecy: Amos". A prophet as one "sent by God with a message, not someone who is consulted by a client to find out what God thinks"; the prophetic books as "anthologies of oracles"; Amos 5:21 to 24 as "an attack on empty piety" in "accompaniment to social injustice".
17. NET: Deuteronomy 28 as listed at [7]; Amos 4:6, 7 to 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. The refrain "Still you did not come back to me" closes each of the five units (4:6, 4:8, 4:9, 4:10, 4:11). "Cleanness of teeth" is the literal Hebrew of Amos 4:6, which more literal English versions print as it stands; the NET renders the sense and puts the idiom in its translators' note on the verse. Lesson 11 uses the verse to show the trade.
18. Hayes, C., RLST 145, Lecture 17, "Literary Prophecy: Hosea and Isaiah". The riv or lawsuit form, which she credits to Hosea as the first prophet to use it formally; the crisis of 734 under Tiglath-Pileser; "Judah refused to join the alliance"; Isaiah's counsel "be quiet and do not fear"; the Greek as "a mistranslation of the word 'young woman' as 'virgin'."
19. NET: Isaiah 7:1 to 13; Isaiah 8:3 to 4; Isaiah 8:18. The shift of address at 7:13 from Ahaz to "family of David" is visible in the NET as printed.
20. The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation (Jewish Publication Society, 1917), Psalm 19:8 and Isaiah 7:14, read at Sefaria. The 1917 JPS is in the public domain and is the edition Editorial Standards 4.7 asks for when quoting the Tanakh as the Tanakh; the 1985 and 2023 JPS translations are copyrighted and are not used here.
21. Septuagint, Isaiah 7:14, Greek text with Brenton's 1851 English translation: idou hē parthenos en gastri hexei, "behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb". Note that Brenton has "a virgin"; the definite article in Matthew 1:23's "The virgin" comes from the Greek article in the Septuagint, not from Brenton's English.
22. Rashi on Isaiah 7:14, read at Sefaria (Judaica Press translation): "My wife will conceive this year. This was the fourth year of Ahaz", and his note that the Hebrew is "actually the future".
23. Ibn Ezra on Isaiah 7:14, tr. M. Friedländer (1873), at Sefaria: "It is to me a matter of surprise that there are those who say the prophet here refers to Jesus, since the sign was given to Ahaz, and Jesus was born many years afterwards."
24. Radak on Isaiah 7:14: almah as a young woman, virgin or not; the mother as Ahaz's wife and the child as Hezekiah. Read via an English summary of the Hebrew, not from the Hebrew itself; no wording is quoted here.
25. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 67, tr. in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1, read at newadvent.org. Trypho's objection quoted; Trypho also proposes Hezekiah as the child.
26. Rashi on Isaiah 53:3, at Sefaria (Judaica Press): the prophet "mentions all Israel as one man", citing 44:1 and 44:2 and taking 52:13 to refer to the house of Jacob. Beale's observation that the Old Testament writers did not exhaustively grasp what they wrote is recorded in SOURCES.md contested question 5 as common ground across the four frameworks; his Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker, 2012) is the place it is worked out, and no page reference is given here.
27. Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 52:13, at Sefaria: "Behold, my servant the messiah shall prosper." Longman, T. and Dillard, R. B., An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2006), for "essentially Mosaic" as the mainstream evangelical position on the Pentateuch's composition, used above in the note on what this lesson's mechanism assumes.
28. On which treaties are the closest parallel: Weinfeld, M., on the Mesopotamian curse tradition shared by the Laws of Hammurabi and Neo-Assyrian treaties; Steymans, H. U., Deuteronomium 28 und die adê zur Thronfolgeregelung Asarhaddons (1995), arguing that Deuteronomy 28:20 to 44 parallels the succession treaty of Esarhaddon; and the Aramaic Sefire treaties, argued by others as the closer Northwest Semitic parallel. The debate is live in evangelical journals as well as critical ones. None of these works was opened; they are named here as the positions in an argument the lesson tells the reader is argued, not quoted for any claim.
29. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1961 to 1974, "The Old Law", read at vatican.va: the Old Law as "the first stage of revealed Law", whose "moral prescriptions are summed up in the Ten Commandments" (1962).
30. Church of England, Articles of Religion, Article VII, "Of the Old Testament": the law "as touching Ceremonies and Rites" does not bind Christians, nor need its "Civil precepts" be received in any commonwealth, "yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral."
31. Formula of Concord (1577), Article VI, "Of the Third Use of the Law", in the Book of Concord: the law restrains the unruly, shows people their sin, and gives the reborn "a definite rule according to which they should pattern and regulate their entire life". Cited from the Epitome as reproduced in the standard English editions; the volume itself was not opened.