Hi Darin,
Thanks for your quick reply.
Toward the end of your last message you wrote:
I do think the Tanakh translation is interesting, however, in seeing the references not to the child but to the Father. Textual omissions otherwise notwisthanding, I'm wondering what you think about that translation of this particular text. It makes much more sense of the passage in isolation and is consistent both with Trinitarian and non-Trinitarian theologies.
At risk of posting a series of ideas that may seem out of step with where the current thread has been going, I'll start by pasting the translated citation that you provided. For anyone who may not be familiar with the term, the Tanakh is another name for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. One translation or another may refer to their own production as the Tanakh, but the term is simply an acronym that refers to the Old Testament.
https://www.city-data.com/forum/christi ... texts.html wrote:
Tanakh: Isaiah 9:6 (9:5 in the Tanakh) For a child has been born to us, a son given to us, and the authority is upon his shoulder, and the wondrous adviser, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, called his name, "the prince of peace."
Notice that in the Tanakh, it is not the child who called the wondrous adviser, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, but is being called the prince of peace BY the wondrous adviser, the mighty God, the everlasting Father. However, in both the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, (and again, both of these are much older than the Tanakh) it is the child who is called the wondrous adviser, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and the prince of peace.
Read more:
https://www.city-data.com/forum/christi ... texts.html
Since noone disputes the interpretation of the first half of the verse I'll focus on the second part. Everyone seems to agree that the verse begins with: "For unto us a child is born, a son is given, and the government/authority will be on his shoulder". That having been said, everyone agrees that the tense should be read as incomplete action despite the perfect tense verbs in this segment.
As a general quirk of Biblical Hebrew grammar, the type of verb that opens the rest of the verse technically describes completed action, but noone I'm aware of reads the passage that way. The verb form here is 3rd person masculine singular. Additional rules dictated by the Masoretic Text compel one to translate the verb as an active form--"he called" (or something similar). Unfortunately, grammatical features of the verse disclose only sparse information about the subject. The reader is confronted with the task of identifying the correct masculine singular noun to fill the slot of the antecedent subject. Accordingly a fearful and wonderful responsibility falls into the hands of translators. "Who is sufficient for these things?"
One reasonable approach is to consider how to preserve contextual integrity by plugging in a subject from any of the (at least) four qualifying noun phrases. The options appear to be:
1. wonderful counsel[lor] or wonder of a counsellor
2. mighty God
3. father of eternity
4. prince of peace
The Tanakh translation cited above (drawn from your earlier post) appears to apply this method. However, instead of choosing one of the noun phrases, the translator selected the first three phrases as the subject. The Hebrew of Isaiah is loose enough to permit such an overload of the subject category, though it's not a first instinct. The translator, who I presume is 'Rabbi' A.J. Rosenburg (according to the chabad site), appears to have followed the cues of the famous medieval rabbinic commentator 'Rashi'. Given that 'Rashi' is well-known for his novel exegetical manuever in revisioning Isaiah's suffering servant (52:13-53:12) as the national-collective of the Jewish people (material Israel), my hesitancy--on the basis of grammar--in adopting the particular view of Isaiah 9:5 held out by the Chabad movement is not diminished by the fact that the medieval innovator espoused it as well.
https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cd ... rashi/true
It is typically--though not always--the case that the noun [phrase] in nearest syntactical proximity to the verb fills the role of the subject. Making decisions of this nature can be dreadfully arbitrary, but most often the context makes things intuitive. However, since none of the noun phrases in Isaiah 9:5 offer definite direct object markers, there are few controls on board to guide the reader to distinguish between the subject and the object (the nominative and the accusative in Greek). Bearing this in mind, the verse might easily be driven to serve the interests of fanciful interpreters (e.g. 'Rashi' said that Isaiah was referring to Hezekiah!?).
I will opine that the decision of the framers of this particular rabbinic translation could as easily have settled on the noun phrase "wonderous counsellor" as the subject and produced the phrase "and a wonderous counsellor called his name mighty God, father of eternity, prince of peace." To further shake things up, the Dead Sea Scrolls segment includes the definite article with the phrase [the] "prince of peace". Since there is no definite direct object marker preceding the phrase and Hebrew grammar prefers to include such a marker one might argue (on the basis of the DSS Isaiah record) that the subject of the phrase is actually "the prince of peace". The conclusion produces the highly unlikely translation "and the prince of peace called his name wonderous counsellor, mighty God, father of eternity".
Another option as to how to understand the text is to consider the possibility that the vocalization scheme added to Isaiah's consonantal text over a thousand years after it was composed may not reflect Isaiah's (and ultimately God's) authoritative intent. The verb וַיִּקְרָא (vay'yiqra) yields a literal translation something like "And he called" (e.g. Lev. 1:1; it's the identical form of the first word in Leviticus, accordingly the book of Leviticus derives it's Hebrew title "Vay'yiqra" from the same word). Thus, the possibility exists that the masoretic scribes made a few errors, whether intentional or not. The masoretes added diacritical features to Isaiah's 'post-publication' text with a suggested purpose of preserving the ancient reading tradition. While DSS records of Isaiah match the consonantal text of the Masoretic Text of Isaiah 9:5 in nearly word perfect form, the DSS remain free of the embellishments of the masoretes' vocalization scheme. The vowels--dots and dashes that sort of resemble morse code--and additional accents were introduced to the text no sooner than the fifth century AD.
Accordingly, the word וַיִּקְרָא (vay'yiqra) appears in the DSS manuscripts as simply ויקרא. Being free from the constraints of the masoretic reading template, the word may be revocalized in such a manner as to reflect translations of the verse similar to those found in most English versions. That is, the verb can simply be read in a passive verb form to yield the meaning "and he was/will be called". Thus, one may opt to emend the vocalization. After all, Isaiah never witnessed these vowel symbols as they were added no earlier than 1500 years ago. A slightly altered vowel combination in one word yields a translation something like "For a child is born to us, a son is given to us, and the government will be upon his shoulder. And his name is called wonder of a counsellor, mighty God, father of eternity, prince of peace." It looks to me like Handel is vindicated.
You can view the DSS verse in digital form via the following link:
http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah#9:6
Concerning rabbinic translations of the Tanakh, the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translated the verse like this:
For a child is born unto us, a son is given unto us; and the government is upon his shoulder; and his name is called Pele-joez-el-gibbor-Abi-ad-sar-shalom
If one compares the 1917 JPS Tanakh with the translation that includes the suggested emendation to the MT it is plain enough to see that the translators of the JPS came up with the same translation. The only difference is that for whatever reason the translators chose to transliterate rather than translate the four noun phrases/titles: wonderful counsellor (or wonder of counsel[lor]), mighty God, father of eternity, prince of peace. Bearing in mind that in 1917 the DSS had not yet been discovered, it suggests that even religious Jewish translators are capable of overriding or modifying the vowel pointing.
See:
http://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1009.htm