😇 Advent 4
Readings: 📜Isaiah 7:10-16; 🎶Psalm 80 (__ LXX):1-7, 17-19; ✉️Romans 1:1-7; 😇Matthew 1:18-25
Central Thesis/Theme: A distinctive six-part Hebraic formula—"You shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name X"—appears only twice in Scripture when spoken by a divine messenger: to Hagar about Ishmael and to Mary about Jesus. This pattern reveals how Matthew and Luke connect Jesus not just to Isaiah's prophecy but to the very first child born according to God's promise.
Key Textual/Historical Insights: The formula consists of two three-part sections. Matthew explicitly cites Isaiah 7:14 and the name Immanuel ("God with us"), but doesn't mention Samson despite the pattern appearing in Judges 13. This may be Matthew's sensitivity to violent figures, even though he doesn't shy from including unsavory characters like Rahab in his genealogy. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) provides older textual witnesses than the Masoretic Hebrew text, which wasn't vowel-pointed until the ninth century.
Theological Argument: The name "Ishmael" means "God hears," directly invoking the Shema of Deuteronomy 6. Every time Jews recite the Shema, they evoke Ishmael's name. God hears when deliverance is needed—whether it's Hagar's cry, Abel's blood from the ground, or the promise of a deliverer. Jesus and Ishmael share this unique bond through the six-part formula, linking Christ back to the beginning of God's promise-keeping, before judges and kings. God's deliverance doesn't always come in the package we'd prefer—sometimes it's Samuel, sometimes it's Samson—but God sends what's needed.
Contemporary Application: Just as the Hebrew text required active engagement (reading aloud with only consonants), we're called to wrestle with God's Word rather than passively consume it. Resources like Blue Letter Bible make this accessible without paywalls or gatekeeping. The reminder that "Yahweh" isn't accurately reduced to "Father God of the sky" challenges imperial or patriarchal theology—God is Emmanuel, "with us," embodied and present rather than distant and dominating.
Questions Raised:
Why does Matthew avoid citing Samson despite the pattern's presence in Judges?
How does recognizing Ishmael's connection to Jesus reshape our understanding of God's promises and who receives them?
What does it mean that the Shema evokes Ishmael every time it's spoken?
How does this six-part formula challenge conventional messianic expectations?
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Isaiah 7:10-16
10 And the Lord again spoke to Achaz, saying, 11 Ask for yourself a sēmeion of the Lord your God, in the depth or in the height. 12 And Achaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord. 13 And he said, Hear y'all now, O house of David; is it a little thing for you to contend with other people? and how do y'all contend against the Lord? 14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, a young woman shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. 15 Butter and honey shall he eat, before he knows either to prefer evil or choose the good. 16 For before the child shall know good or evil, he refuses evil, to choose the good; and the land shall be forsaken which you are afraid of because of the two kings.
Psalm 80
1 Attend, O Shepherd of Israel, who guide Joseph like a flock; you who sit upon the cherubs, manifest yourself;
2 before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, stir up your courage, and come to save us.
3 Turn us, O God, and cause your face to shine; and we shall be saved.
4 O Divine Commander, how long are you angry with the prayer of The People ?
5 You will feed us with work-food of tears; and will cause us to drink tears by measure.
6 You have disordered us before our neighbors; and our enemies have mocked us.
7 Turn us, Divine Commander, and cause your face to shine; and we shall be saved.
17 Let your hand be upon the man of your right hand, and upon the child of humanity whom you Yourself encourage.
18 So will we not depart from you: enliven us and we will call upon your name.
19 Turn us, Divine Commander, and make your face to shine; and we shall be saved.
Romans 1:1-7
1 Paul, a slave of Joshua Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the good news of God, 2 which he promised before through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, 3 concerning his Son, who was made the descendant of David according to the flesh, 4 who was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Joshua Christ our Lord, 5 through whom we received joy and belonging [apostolē] for the reception [hypakoē ] of faith among All People for his name’s sake; 6 among whom you are also are appointed to Joshua Christ; 7 to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, appointed saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Joshua Christ.
Matthew 1:18-25
18 Now the birth of Christ Joshua was like this: When his mother Mary had been promised to Joseph, before they came together she was found full of the Holy Spirit. 19 And the man Joseph, being righteous, was not about to make a spectacle, so he planned to keep the matter private. 20 But when he thought long and hard about it, a messenger of God came to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David , don’t worry about partnering with the woman Mary: what’s being made within her is of the Holy Spirit. 21 And she shall bear a son; and thou shalt call his name Joshua; for he will save The People from their faults . 22 Now all this is come to pass, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying,
23 Behold, the young lady shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, And they shall call his name emmanouēl; which means “God with us.” [Isaiah 7:14]
24 And Joseph arose from his sleep, and did as the Lord’s messenger instructed him, and accepted the woman as his partner; 25 and wasn’t intimate with her until she had borne a son: and he called his name Joshua.
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Good morning and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon.
This morning's readings come to us from Isaiah 7, Psalm 80, I think Romans 1, and Matthew 1. If you noticed a difference between my reading and any reading you might be following along with, it's because I am beginning to translate or paraphrase the Bible myself. That's why you can go to pewpewhq.com/tfw and I'll take you to The Fighting Word, which is the main page for my exegetical project, which includes this podcast and also The Fighting Word—what I call the grunt-ish version of the Bible. You can see I've already started work there, and this podcast is creating a deadline for me to translate or paraphrase some of this stuff.
For many years I've been doing the dailies—the daily lectionary—and that really got me comfortable with the Bible. I've been doing Greek and Hebrew word studies, just nouns and verbs and roots. We came up on a new year, a lectionary three-year cycle, and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do the Sundays now. So that's what I'm doing, and I'm trying to do it with a little bit more effort than I did First Formation. First Formation was the dailies, and it's become Fighting Words. I'll say more about that elsewhere. You can kind of put two and two together.
But as I go through and read the lectionary the week before, I've undertaken the basic rabbinical or pharisaical work of reading the Bible every day. It has and will, I'm sure, continue to build my confidence in trusting my own experience as a veteran, as an American, as someone who's motivated by good news—even though the word "evangelical" has become entirely corrupted by the zeitgeist.
This morning's readings call out some really important parts of the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, that we don't always pay attention to. And it's something I caught onto, and I just could not get it out of my brain. So the last week I've been doing a more in-depth Bible study on these six words. I'll call it a linguistic formula: "You shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name X."
This morning's readings do that for us. Matthew is using this frame. He points to Isaiah 7:14, and he quotes the Greek Hebrew Bible pretty closely. I won't get into the Greek, but if you want to read more about this specific topic, go to The Fighting Word blog, and you'll see where I'll put up an essay. If you want to get it straight to your inbox, you have to go to martinalia, which is my email newsletter at newsletter@pewpew.ghost.io. Sign up there. You can get it into your email inbox. I'm going to send it out later, as soon as I'm done with this podcast.
But this six-piece Hebraic formula—in the Greek too, I was following the Greek because we have older versions of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. We don't have Hebrew Bibles until the ninth century when they put in vowels. Before that it was really important to read the text aloud, but the text only had the consonants. So when you were young like me, your parents may have tried to hide what they were saying by spelling words, and then as you got older and you could spell, they left out the vowels. Kind of like that.
Last week I talked about how that is a feature of the Hebrew. It's not a bug. It's supposed to be like that. We're supposed to engage with the Word of God. And if we don't speak Hebrew—I don't—you can study it. It's not a private language that you have to access through paywalls. There's lots of ways you can read it. I use Blue Letter Bible.org. They do not pay me. I've just been using them for years and I'm used to it. There may be better, easier platforms I could plug, but I've been using Blue Letter Bible forever, and I love it. It works for me.
Anyway, so this six-part formula—it's actually two parts of three. "You shall conceive and bear a son," which is masculine child. And in the second three-part: "You shall call his name," whatever the name is.
In Isaiah—which we read, and from Matthew, because Matthew points to Isaiah—in the Isaiah passage it's a third person. There's a prophetic figure who... the quote comes in verse 14 and it's almost a curse because the name is supposed to remind the other person of the fear that they have of two kings. It's not a prophetic utterance directly to one of the protagonists of the Bible, the exemplars that they're trying to point you to. It's some third party figure.
But Matthew really likes "God with us," and so do I. And it's a pretty succinct way of talking about the God of the universe through whom I believe has spoken to the Jews, the Hebraic, the Israelite people. It's a metaphor that I chose a long time ago and it has never let me down.
Matthew points to Isaiah and he uses this formula, this six-part formula, and he kind of splits it up. Read more about it in the essay. But what I found as I did my Bible study last week was that this six-part formula comes out in some really interesting ways that Matthew is leaning on but doesn't cite explicitly like he does the prophet Isaiah. It's Isaiah 7:14. He doesn't say it in the text, but he wants you to know he is quoting from the prophets to show that this figure that is going to be born is a divine deliverer.
So put Isaiah 7 on the shelf for a second and Matthew 1, but not totally. Luke has a similar thing and the whole first chapter of Luke is just incredible. But in Luke we use all six parts of this formula, and it's also delivered like Isaiah from a prophetic divine messenger, but it isn't who we like.
This is the first time I found this connection—it was months, maybe years ago. And I haven't really put as much effort into organizing my thoughts until this week. But that figure that Luke is pointing to is Samson. The twelfth judge in the Old Testament. We talk about him in Judges 13 to 15.
And Samson is not the kind of person you want to be paying attention to. He's kind of like how I feel about the current president. It's like, I don't like you, but like, sure, you're breaking some things that need to be broken. Like, okay, fine. Samson's like that. He's a jerk. He's insecure with women. He can't keep his mouth shut. He's a braggart. He's basically like the current Secretary of Defense who wants to call it the Department of War, which isn't going to happen because it's an act of Congress anyway.
Samson's not the kind of person you want to think about too much, and I feel like Matthew knows that. He doesn't want to use the name Samson. Other parts will talk about how it also appears in Genesis 16. But anyway, Matthew seems to be aware that there's a particular name that this deliverer is given, and it's not Samson. And it's also not Samuel, because this pattern appears—not the full formula, but the pattern appears with Hannah and Samuel.
But Matthew also seems to not want to draw up too many associations with violent characters in particular. Matthew calls out Rahab the prostitute. He calls out another woman in his genealogy that slept with her own stepfather, I think. So he is not afraid of unsavory figures, but Matthew does seem to be particularly sensitive to violent unsavory figures. Not unlike a lot of theologians I know that don't even like to talk about Joshua and Judges as though there's anything good that came out of Nazareth. I mean, Joshua and Judges.
But anyway, so without further ado, the six-part formula—"shall conceive and bear a son and you shall name him X"—spoken by Gabriel, the angel Gabriel, in Luke 1. The only time that entire six-part equation appears on the lips of a divine messenger to a formerly barren woman is Ishmael.
In Genesis 16, Hagar is told after she is given to Abram because Sarah can't have kids. Hagar and Abram conceive Abraham's eldest male child, Ishmael, and she runs off—Hagar runs off into the wilderness with Ishmael—because Sarah's being a bitch. And so Hagar is going to die in the wilderness. That's what you do, and Abram's kind of absent on this, which is unfortunate. But also this divine messenger, this angel, comes and tells Hagar this exact six-sentence formula: "You shall conceive and bear a son. You shall call him Ishmael."
And Ishmael's name is a call out to Deuteronomy 6, the Shema of Israel: "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one." The Lord is God, or the Lord is his name. I can't remember. Anyway, but the Shema is where we get Ishmael. And so every time Jews would say the Shema, they are evoking Ishmael's name. And it means "God hears" because God hears Hagar's cry. God hears Abel's cry from the ground as blood. God hears when deliverance—which is a kind of birth delivery—when the people need it, God sends it. And it's not necessarily the person you want. It isn't always Samuel. Sometimes it's Samson, although it is Samuel. And Hannah also has this pattern, the six-sentence or six-word formula.
So that, and that is the only two places where that occurs. The entire two parts of three plus divine message is Ishmael and Jesus. Luke is certainly aware of this, if not the Samson piece, certainly the Ishmael piece, because he doesn't call him Samson. But Ishmael reaches all the way back to the beginning, right before Judges. And Christ is a judge, a shophet, in the Israelite tradition he is. But he's also all the way back at the very first child to be born according to the promise of God. Ishmael and Jesus have this unique bond in this six-part figure that we only get in the Annunciation.
And then Matthew, he points to Isaiah 7, which is also picking up on this same thing from Genesis. But he wants to steer us in a particular direction, to remind us—Matthew does—that God is a particular kind of God that doesn't exist all up in the sky. It isn't accurate to call Yahweh either "Father God of the sky that seeds inseminate the earth mother." It's not either/or. It's right here. That is what it means to worship a God, a Word, or a logical explanation to everything we can... to explain however you want to define or interpret. All of these just incredible mix of linguistic turns of phrases and rhyming and everything—all the stuff, all the meaning, all the need, all the yearning—we find it in the Christ whose name is Joshua, who reminds us of the military commander, but also the high priest that built the second temple that gave birth to the Jewish Renaissance that created a bunch of these texts. And if that isn't a Charlie Day board back to Joshua Christ, I don't know what is.
But that is our reading for Advent Four.
