Bible Review

See Mark S. Smith, “Divine Form and Size in Ugaritic and Pre-exilic Israelite Religion,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 100 (1988), pp. 424–427.

For such a symbolic sentence name, compare Isaiah’s own sons Shear-Yashuv “A Remnant Shall Return” (Isaiah 7:3) and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz “Plunder Rushes, Spoil Hurries” (Isaiah 8:14).

See Raymond E. Brown, Birth of the Messiah, pp. 143–153. As Brown notes, a Ugaritic text of the Late Bronze Age also speaks of a g’lmt (=Hebrew ‘almaÆ) bearing a son—so, if Jesus is prefigured in the Old Testament, he is in Ugaritic, too!

The final “God with us” is not in King James but has been added by Jennens.

The nonliteral interpretation of Isaiah 40:3 might go back to John the Baptist himself and even earlier, since the verse was also applied to the Qumran community. See Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 284.

Technically, pesher is a literary genre, not a mode of interpretation. See Devorah Diamant, s.v. “Pesharim, Qumran,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 244–251.

In other words, “my people” is not vocative but direct object. Likewise the ancient Greek translation. The Vulgate, however, takes Israel as the addressee—despite Jerome’s considerable proficiency in Hebrew.