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Isaiah's Astimatism As Stigmata.

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
Astigmatism is a type of refractive error in which the eye does not focus light evenly on the retina.[1] This results in distorted or blurred vision at any distance.[1]

Wikipedia.

He said, "Go and tell this people . . . be ever seeing, but never perceiving.

Isaiah 6:9​

Isaiah's prophesy, particularly in the second (deutero) part, is clearly a retroactive stigmata. And yet because of the distance involved in the retro-activity, some of the particulars of the stigmata are blurred even for the prophet himself, while, on the other hand, for his core audience, all, or most of his prophesy, is astigmatic, since it's distorted and misunderstood at any distance.



John
 
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MNoBody

Well-Known Member
a couple eyeball/vision graphics....not sure if you are interested in such, let me know if you aren't.
 

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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
a couple eyeball/vision graphics....not sure if you are interested in such, let me know if you aren't.

Awesome. Thank you. I've saved them for some other arguments where they will be extremely valuable. I could have used these images in arguments I've made in the past so many times. Now I have them. Thanks again.



John
 

MNoBody

Well-Known Member
Awesome. Thank you. I've saved them for some other arguments where they will be extremely valuable. I could have used these images in arguments I've made in the past so many times. Now I have them. Thanks again.



John
no worries, glad they can be of some use, I just came across them the other night and they seemed save worthy.
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
Astigmatism is a type of refractive error in which the eye does not focus light evenly on the retina.[1] This results in distorted or blurred vision at any distance.[1]

Wikipedia.​

He said, "Go and tell this people . . . be ever seeing, but never perceiving.

Isaiah 6:9​

Isaiah's prophesy, particularly in the second (deutero) part, is clearly a retroactive stigmata. And yet because of the distance involved in the retro-activity, some of the particulars of the stigmata are blurred even for the prophet himself, while, on the other hand, for his core audience, all, or most of his prophesy, is astigmatic, since it's distorted and misunderstood at any distance.

In two recent threads on exegeting Isaiah 53:9, I pointed out a fortuitous nuance in the Hebrew of the verse. The word translated “death” or “deaths” (since the word במתיו is plural) is actually the Hebrew word for a “shrine” or “high place.”

At the time of the threads, which became two essays on Exegeting Isaiah 53:9, I searched the Jewish sages, and to my amazement none of them touched on the exegetical nuance that that word was being interpreted and or translated “death,” or “deaths”; and this is the case not only in the Christian texts, but in the Masoretic text, the Jewish text, from whence the Christian texts arose.

This unique interpretation/translation is particularly ironic since translating the word “death” or “deaths” is a haxpax legomenon, i.e., the only place in the Tanakh it’s interpreted that way.

As fate would have it, last night I received my copy of Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on Isaiah, and to my amazement, the great Hebrew exegete is the only Jewish exegete I’ve encountered who noticed the same thing I did; that the word translated “death” or “deaths” is the word for a “shrine” or “high place.”

The peculiarity of this strange omission is particularly strange since not only is translating the word “death” or “deaths” a hapax legomenon (singular occurrence in the Tanakh), but, for God’s sake, the great Ibn Ezra lived something like a thousand years ago; meaning why did not his contemporaries, or all the great Jewish sages living since his day, knowing the word is translated against the grain of the actual Hebrew word, look at how their great exegetical fore-bearer (Ibn Ezra) exegeted the passage?

Some refer this verse to those Israelites that die in exile; others derive במתיו from במה “high places;” comp. במתימו “their high places” (Deut. Xxxiii. 29), and refer it to the building erected over the grave; so that קבדו=במתיו “his tomb.”​

To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t seem too difficult to see why the Jewish sages don’t want to do their due diligence concerning the oddity of interpreting במתיו as “death” or “deaths,” when we but note what's in the cross hairs, so to say, of speaking of a perfect martyrdom and his death, which the chapter claims is an atoning sacrifice, becoming, in verse 9, a shrine, where prayers and worship to deity are directed.



John
 
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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t seem too difficult to see why the Jewish sages don’t want to do their due diligence concerning the oddity of interpreting במתיו as “death” or “deaths,” when we but note what's in the cross hairs, so to say, of speaking of a perfect martyrdom and his death, which the chapter claims is an atoning sacrifice, becoming, in verse 9, a shrine, where prayers and worship to deity are directed.

. . . Let me hammer this home; or nail down what the statement above implies; and why the Jewish sages can't touch that word with a ten foot pole, even if it has hyssop on a sponge to offer to the suffering servant.

Ibn Ezra's sound interpretation of the word implies it signifies not just a "high place" במה which is a shrine where prayers and worship are directed, but one associated with death. In the majority of the Jewish sages' exegesis of Isaiah 53, they want to imply it refers to the nation of Israel as the suffering servant; which to some extent they are.

But as many fair-minded sages note, the language in Isaiah 53 seems to imply a singular personage and not Israel as the national suffering servant. Isaiah 53 seems to imply a single Jew who is a member of the suffering people, who suffers even more, for them, and, in some reading, at their behest.

Nevertheless, the most important point of all, and why many Jewish sages' minds refuse even to go here, is the fact, and it is a fact, that in every case in the Tanakh, but Isaiah 53:9, the word translated "death" or "deaths" speaks not just of a "tomb" or a place of reverence for the dead, but as an altar, or shrine, where prayers, supplication, and worship, is directed toward deity.

Do you see the huge problem for the Jewish exegetes, and why they create and support a problematic hapax legomenon in Isaiah 53:9?

If the suffering servant is the nation Israel, and not a singular personage, then not only is the verse claiming that the nation of Israel suffers for the crimes of the goyim, the nations, in an atoning sort of way, but the text implies the nation of Israel is worthy of worship, as though it is divine, in respect to the non-Jewish nations of the world:

The Hebrews had for idols, not metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as worldly. Their religion is in essence inseparable from such idolatry, because of their notion of the "elect (chosen) people."

Simone Weil, quoted in Elliot R. Wolfson's, Giving Beyond the Gift.​



John
 
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John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
If the suffering servant is the nation Israel, and not a singular personage, then not only is the verse claiming that the nation of Israel suffers for the crimes of the goyim, the nations, in an atoning sort of way, but the text implies the nation of Israel is worthy of worship, as though it is divine, in respect to the non-Jewish nations of the world:

The Hebrews had for idols, not metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as worldly. Their religion is in essence inseparable from such idolatry, because of their notion of the "elect (chosen) people."

Simone Weil, quoted in Elliot R. Wolfson's, Giving Beyond the Gift.​

. . . Let me hammer this home; or nail down what the statement above implies; and why the Jewish sages can't touch that word with a ten foot pole, even if it has hyssop on a sponge to offer to the suffering servant.

Judaism's primary rejection of their Jewish brother's beliefs which became Christianity centered on the problem of divine incarnation: worshiping deity allegedly existing in human beings, or animals: living, biological, temples.

And yet the suffering servant in Isaiah 53, whom Judaism's Jewish nemesis read as Jesus of Nazareth, clearly, factually, speaks of the suffering servant becoming a shrine במה where prayer and worship are directed to a deity.

If Israel doesn't come up with a different interpretation of the word במה they not only can't claim it means the nation of Israel, since they're not deity according to Judaism, but they have the equally pointy problem of the fact that even if the text isn't speaking of the nation of Israel, it's clearly speaking of a real, suffering, person, whose place of death becomes an altar, a shrine, associated in all cases, with deity.



John
 

John D. Brey

Well-Known Member
If Israel doesn't come up with a different interpretation of the word במה they not only can't claim it means the nation of Israel, since they're not deity according to Judaism, but they have the equally pointy problem of the fact that even if the text isn't speaking of the nation of Israel, it's clearly speaking of a real, suffering, person, whose place of death becomes an altar, a shrine, associated in all cases, with deity.

The weight of the statement above doesn't seem like it could get any worse. But wait. It does.

As the brilliant Jewish sages are aware, and say themselves, never give up just because the exegesis is problematic or hard to understand. For if you work through it, it will reverberate throughout the scripture, and rework other interpretations whose deeper meaning required the diamond freed from the rough exegesis it was encased in.

This is an encased diamond in point.

Once we realize what's being said about the nature of the shrine in Isaiah 53:9, our minds might wander to Isaiah 22, where we encounter another suffering servant, whom, Judaism's nemesis, again, relate to Jesus of Nazareth, and thus to a cross as a shrine related to death where prayer and supplication, worship, are directed.

In Psalm 22:29 (the numbering of the verses may be different in the Jewish text) we read that, "All who go down to the dust shall bow before him."

This is pretty powerful stuff when we realize that millions and billions of graves ("go down to the dust" represents death) have a cross at their head such that billions and billions of times, already, the one going down to the dust, literally bows before the shrine noted in Isaiah 53:9. And if, realizing the symbiotic relationship between Psalms and Isaiah, we combine parallel verses from the two, we read:

All who go down to the dust shall bow before him . . . They will bow down before you with their faces to the ground and lick the dust at your feet.

Psalms 22:29; Isaiah 49:23.​

The shrine in Isaiah 53:9 has the two-fold distinction that not only is it the place of death, and finality, the ktav ivri tav (the final Hebrew letter which symbolizes capital judgment din), but this shrine associated with death, is placed as a shrine above the very place of death, the dust of the grave, so that the one not subject to death, the one who rose from the dust, rose from the grave, stands above the dead as they kneel before him, face down, kissing his feet and praying, that as he rose from the dust, from the grave, he might lift them out too:

All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him since none can keep alive his own soul [save the Savior who can save yours].

Psalms 22:29.​

These verses, based on factual interpretation freed from the lying pen of the scribe (Jeremiah 8:8), imply that the shrine representing the death of the divine son becomes a global shrine found from one corner of the earth to the other whereby the dead appeal, with prayer and supplication, to the only man who has ever been freed from the dust, the grave, for he's the divine son of God:

For you will not abandon my soul to the grave, nor will you suffer your devoted one to see decomposition . . . Favor me O God. Behold my affliction prepared for me by those who hate me, O You Who alone raises me above death's portals.

Isaiah 15:10; 9:14.​

These verses all transform the final letter in the sacred script of scripture ---- ----- into the mezuzah at the gates of eternity otherwise known as the hymen of the morgue. Which is surely part and parcel of the Jewish sages' willingness to crucify the text of Isaiah 53:9 so that it can no longer speak a living word to a hearer with circumcised ears; so that it can no longer produce a sight for sore eyes, but instead deliver up a stigmata stigmatized by the astigmatic distortions producing blurred-vision concerning the most important vision in all of the word of God.



John
 
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