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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] verb forms - Isaiah 56:6-7 was dying you shall die

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] verb forms - Isaiah 56:6-7 was dying you shall die
  • Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:02:25 +0100

On 11/04/2007 23:26, Lisbeth S. Fried wrote:
...
Dear Peter,
It is not the case that the temple was always open to everyone's offerings.
It was not open to the non-Jew. If you chance to go to the Archaeological
Museum in Istanbul and go to the third floor you will see a stone monument
there carved in Greek which warns the non-Jew not to step beyond this point.
That stone stood on the temple mount. (Ironically, now it is the Jew who is
forbidden access to that spot.)

Been there, seen that, wish I'd got the T-shirt! ;-)

I didn't say that the Temple WAS always open to anyone's offerings. My point is that it SHOULD HAVE BEEN, according to Moses and Isaiah as well as Jesus. But some Jews turned their religion into a narrowly nationalistic business ("business" indeed as we see from the context of Jesus' quotes from Isaiah) and excluded the Gentiles. This was never God's intention, as far as I can tell from the Hebrew Bible, although we do see the roots of that exclusiveness in Nehemiah, where the excluded Gentiles were those seeking to destabilise the newly rebuilt city and so were rejected for political reasons.

Also, there are discussions in the DSS and in the Talmud also I believe as
to whether it was admissible for the temple to accept the donations of
foreigners. The DSS community did not agree that foreign donations were
acceptable. The revolt against Rome began when Eliazar (the son of the high
priest Ananias) decided not to accept the king's sacrifice. OTOH, the book
of Ezra reports the contributions of both Darius and Artaxerxes to the
temple.

This simply illustrates how far late Second Temple Judaism had gone away from its roots in the Torah and the Prophets.

The whole point of the passage in Isaiah 56 is to look forward to the time
when God's house would be called the house of prayer of all peoples. At the
time when the text was written the temple had been destroyed by Babylon and
newly rebuilt. The writer of Isaiah 56 is hoping for a more benign world
than the world which existed then, and exists today.

I know this is the traditional exegesis. But why do you exclude the thought that the author was hoping and perhaps campaigning for the newly rebuilt Temple in his own time to be open to all? You can't do so on the basis of the Hebrew verb forms, at least as well as they are understood today.

I could understand Harold and Bryant wanting to reject my suggested interpretation on the basis of the future verbs in the verse as quoted by Jesus, and in LXX. But I don't see why you are insisting on this.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://www.qaya.org/blog/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/





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