“This was to fulfill the what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”– Matthew 2:15
“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”–Hosea 11:1
The idea of Jesus as fulfillment of prophecy is used as one of the strongest weapons in the apologist’s toolbox. I’ve heard many times that the most convincing evidence for Christianity’s validity is how Jesus was predicted countless times in the Old Testament. When I googled “messianic prophecies,” a staggering amount of results appeared. One website offers 44 different prophecies Jesus fulfilled. The next offered 365. The next was a website entirely devoted to the Old Testament’s prediction of Christ. While I have unfortunately lost the page number (I know, there goes my credibility), Halley’s Bible Handbook makes the claim that the entire life and story of Christ is foretold in the Hebrew Bible. In my high school days, I loved this. What surer way to know Jesus is the son of God than by an astounding array of prophecy and fulfillment?
My first semester of college, I took an Old Testament class and read the Hebrew Bible cover to cover. This seriously crippled my view of the Old Testament’s prediction of Jesus. The reason was simple: when a verse was pulled out of context, it sounded like the author was making a prediction. When the actual passage was read in context, it was almost always part of a larger story or message, and one that was not attempting to be prophetic in that sense.
An example comes from the texts listed above. In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph, Mary and Jesus hide in Egypt while Herod kills all of the male babies in Bethlehem. After they return, Matthew calls this movement a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” Hosea 11 is definitely not claiming to predict that the future Messiah will go to Egypt and come back to Judah. This verse is in part of a larger section of Hosea, in which the prophet presents a series of metaphors to describe Israel and its relationship to Yahweh. Israel is a grapevine God found in the wilderness (ch. 9), a vine overgrown with thorns (10:1-7), a trained heifer (10:11-15), and a wayward child (11:1-11). Hosea 11 is immensely personal, describing God’s pain over watching his child, Israel, turn away from him. Like a parent who did the best for their child but watched them turn away, Yahweh longingly thinks over all that he did for his son. His child, Israel, was a slave in Egypt, and God brought him out of the oppression they were facing.
Consider also Matthew 1:22-23, where the gospel writer quotes Isaiah: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel (Note- I am aware of the myriad of controversy surrounding the exact meaning of “almah,” translated “virgin” in most translations. For a brief explanation of why I am comfortable with this translation, see the appendix at the end).“ Matthew quotes Isaiah’s words in Isaiah 7:14. In the original setting, Isaiah is speaking to King Ahaz, who is contemplating a treaty which God has told him not to accept. The Assyrians are coming to Judah, and Judah’s army is no match. Their only hope is to ally with Israel (the northern kingdom) and Syria, which God has forbidden due to their idolatry. As Ahaz ponders the fate if his country, Isaiah offers him a sign: See that virgin (again, I will defend this wording later) over there? She’s going to have a child, and by the time the child is old enough to know good from evil, the king you’re afraid of right now will be history (cf. Isaiah 7:14-16).
The miracle Isaiah is predicting here is not a biological impossibility occurring, but the downfall of the Assyrian empire. The young woman Isaiah is referring to may have been a virgin at the time, but certainly was not by the time she gave birth. The woman had a child, and by the time he was old enough to assume responsibility for his actions (in Jewish thinking, probably between 11 and 13), Assyria was no longer a threat. Had Isaiah been predicting a miraculous conception 700 years in the future, he would not have been a very good prophet; after all, what comfort would that have been to Ahaz, facing destruction here and now?
Now, obviously, the New Testament writers saw these passages as predictive signs of Jesus’ messiahship. And the New Testament writers are authoritative, not to mention smarter than I am. So how do we approach messianic citation passages like those addressed above?
One of the most compelling aspects of scripture is how it reinterprets other materials. I could write on and on about the Old Testament’s reinterpretation and revision of other religious ideas, and may in a future article. The New Testament continues this trend by constantly reinterpreting the old. This is what I believe the gospel writers were doing. Matthew’s readers would have been immediately familiar with Isaiah 7, and would have appreciated his usage of it. It’s like Matthew is saying: “Remember when Isaiah predicted the young, engaged woman becoming pregnant and the peace from Assyria? Well, Jesus was born of a mother who was still a virgin when she gave birth. And he brought peace from something more than a nation: he brought peace from death itself. And remember Hosea, and his story about Israel as God’s child? Well I’ve got a story about God’s child for you, and it’s not a metaphor. This guy’s the real deal!”
Understanding that the writers of the Old Testament were not laying down specific qualifications of a future messiah does not in any way diminish the incredibility of what the gospel writers were doing. It’s like when Jesus is the synagogue, reading Isaiah 61:1 and telling the people that the scripture has been fulfilled before them (see Luke 3:16-30). Jesus let the oppressed go free alright, but he was thinking bigger than the Jews being under the Romans; he freed the sinners from their sin. My intent is never to degrade Scripture, but to bring those reading to a fuller, richer understanding. Those lists of all the prophecies Jesus fulfilled may not be the same powerful weapons if the authors weren’t actually making predictions, but the gospel’s power is seen in a fuller light. In the end, I’ll take that over an attempt at obtaining certainty any day of the week.
Appendix for people with nothing better to do: In Isaiah 7:14, the writer refers to the mother to be as an almah (forgive my lack of Hebrew/Greek fonts). This word is a somewhat obscure term that occurs only nine times in the Hebrew Bible. Two of these are of particular interest to understanding the correct interpretation of the Isaiah passage. The first is Genesis 24:14, in which Abraham’s servant prays to God to show him an almah worthy of being a wife for Isaac. In the culture of the Ancient Near East, virginity was obviously a requirement for marriage. The fact that the writer of Genesis used almah instead of the more common na’arah (young woman) may indicate that virginity was part of the idea of an almah. A passage commonly cited against understanding almah as virgin is Proverbs 30:19. While describing things difficult to understand, the writer refers to “the way of a young man with an almah. Obviously a reference to sexual relations, this passage is often used to claim that an almah is not related to sexual status. It seems to me equally probably that the Proverbs refers specifically to the loss of virginity. Given its extremely high value in biblical times, the writer may be referring to the consummation of marriage as the act he cannot understand, along with “a bird flying in the air.”
Almah has no direct corresponding English word because the Hebrew conception of growth into maturity is different than the modern one. While we typically think of growth in biological states (i.e., a boy becomes a man after puberty), the Hebrew conception was based in moral ability. A yeledah(female child) was one not capable of discerning right from wrong. A na’arah was able to make this distinction. It is my conclusion that an almah was a stage in between, one in which the girl was on the verge of being able to discern good and evil, and therefore at appropriate age to marry. While the word “almah” might not refer specifically to biological virginity, it was likely a necessary part of the connotation of the word.
J. E. Raabe 