Judaism

Christians should not flinch at this hope; they share it. The day when weapons become farm tools and the knowledge of God covers the earth is the Christian expectation too; it is what believers pray every time they say “Your kingdom come.” So the right response is not to shrink the prophecies but to own them: yes, the Messiah’s reign ends in a world without war, and no, that has not visibly arrived. The disagreement is about when and in what order, not about whether the peace is real.

The objection assumes a single, wooden, all-at-once standard that Judaism itself does not uniformly hold. Maimonides, the very authority who lists the Temple and the ingathering as tests, also taught that the natural order does not change in the messianic age and read the wolf-and-lamb prophecy as a metaphor for Israel dwelling securely among once-hostile nations:

Do not presume that in the Messianic age any facet of the world’s nature will change.

If a leading Jewish authority reads some of the peace imagery figuratively and expects the world to “continue according to its pattern,” then “Jesus didn’t literally make wolves vegetarian” is not decisive. Judaism contains a range of views on how literally and how suddenly the messianic transformation comes.

The Christian claim is that the Messiah’s kingdom is inaugurated and then consummated: already and not yet. In Daniel’s vision the “one like a son of man” receives everlasting dominion in the heavenly court (Daniel 7:13-14). The New Testament says that enthronement has happened and that Jesus reigns now, with the visible, war-ending phase still ahead. Jesus himself spoke of a kingdom that arrives first in a hidden, growing form and only later in open glory. So Christians do not claim the age of peace has already come; they claim the King has already come once, and will return to complete what he began. This is the case laid out in Jesus and messianic prophecy.

Why expect the consummation if the peace is not here yet? Because the first decisive act is claimed to have already happened in public: God raised the Messiah and exalted him (Acts 2:22-36). The resurrection functions as the down payment on the promised age: God’s verdict that this is the King, and therefore that his unfinished work will be finished. Take the resurrection away and “peace is coming later” is an empty IOU. Grant it, and the deferred kingdom rests on a verdict already rendered, as argued in the resurrection as messianic vindication.

The reign is not a detail to be explained away. The prophets really do promise a Davidic king who rules forever, gathers Israel, and establishes justice and peace, and Christians should affirm every word of that hope rather than spiritualize it into nothing. The honest Christian position is not “the kingdom already looks the way Isaiah described”; it is “that visible kingdom is real and still future, and here is why we believe the King has already come once.”

Alongside the reigning king, the Tanakh contains a wounded, rejected figure, and the texts are Israel’s own:

• Daniel sees “an anointed one” who “will disappear,” cut off after sixty-two weeks and before the city and sanctuary are destroyed (Daniel 9:26). An anointed one is removed before the Temple falls, not after he rebuilds it.
• Isaiah 53 describes a servant struck for “my people,” buried, then given long life and reward.
• Zechariah hears God say the house of David will “lament to Me about” the one they pierced, mourning him as an only son (Zechariah 12:10).

Rabbinic tradition felt this tension and answered it from within Judaism by positing two figures: Messiah son of Joseph, who suffers and dies in battle, and Messiah son of David, who reigns. A suffering messiah, in other words, is not a Christian invention smuggled into the Hebrew Bible. The question is how the suffering and the reigning fit together.

Christianity resolves the tension not by denying the reign but by sequencing it. The Messiah first suffers, dies, and is raised; he is then enthroned at God’s right hand, hears “Sit at My right hand” (Psalm 110:1), receives everlasting dominion in the heavenly court (Daniel 7:13-14), and returns to complete the visible kingdom the prophets describe. Peter’s sermon makes exactly this move: the crucified Jesus has been “raised up” and “exalted to the right hand of God,” and now reigns until the consummation (Acts 2:22-36). The throne is not canceled; it is occupied now and disclosed in full later. This is the same case developed in Jesus and messianic prophecy.

Maimonides’ test, did he build the Temple and gather the exiles, quietly assumes the candidate stays dead. The Christian claim is that he did not. The curse of Deuteronomy 21:23 is not denied but taken up: the New Testament argues that the Messiah bore that curse in his death, and that God reversed the verdict by raising him. So the crucifixion is not the end of the case but the start of it. The resurrection is what turns an executed claimant into a vindicated King, as argued in the resurrection as messianic vindication. Without the empty tomb the objection stands. With it, “he died before reigning” becomes “he died, was raised, and now reigns.”

Take the objection’s best case and grant it. Read as a flat prediction, Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 fails; Hosea is not forecasting a future trip to Egypt; he is recalling the Exodus. A Christian who insists Hosea “predicted” the flight to Egypt is not reading Hosea, and the critic is right to press the point. The way forward is not to defend a claim the text never made, but to ask what claim Matthew is actually making.

The objection’s hidden move is to file every citation under a single heading; “prediction that didn’t fit”, when the New Testament is doing several different things:

• Direct prediction; some texts are read as straightforward forecasts (for example, the birthplace of the Messiah).
• Typology; Hosea 11:1 is recapitulation, not prediction. Matthew presents Jesus as the true Israel reliving and completing the nation’s story: carried to Egypt, brought out, passing through the water of baptism, tested forty days in the wilderness. “Fulfill” here means “fill full,” bring a pattern to its intended climax.
• Canonical echo; quoting one line of a psalm to summon its whole context, so the reader hears the entire scene.

Reading Israel’s earlier story as a template for later events is an ancient Jewish technique, not a Christian trick. The disciplined question is which kind of use a given citation makes, and whether the pattern it claims is really there in the Hebrew text.

Where the Greek and the Hebrew diverge, say so plainly. Psalm 22 is the classic case: the received Hebrew vocalization reads “like a lion” at my hands and feet, while the Greek (the Septuagint) reads a verb closer to “they dug/pierced,” and a Dead Sea Psalms fragment appears to support a verb form rather than the noun “lion.” This is a genuine, arguable textual question, not sleight of hand.

The New Testament writers generally quote the Septuagint because it was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews, and in several disputed places that Greek preserves a reading older than the medieval Masoretic standardization. A reader deserves to be shown the variants and trusted to weigh them, which is a stronger position than pretending the differences do not exist. The same candor belongs in the almah debate over Isaiah 7:14.

The central New Testament claim is not “here are isolated predictions” but “Israel’s entire story comes to its head in this person.” On the road to Emmaus, Jesus reads Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms as one unified witness to a Messiah who suffers and is then glorified (Luke 24:25-27). That claim is tested by whether the pattern holds; exodus and return, exile and restoration, covenant, kingship, suffering, vindication, all converging, not only by any single verse. Judged that way, the citations are moves within a larger reading of Scripture, the case set out in Jesus and messianic prophecy and the reliability of the New Testament.

The corporate reading is not a dodge; it is built on the text. Isaiah really does call the nation his servant, by name, more than once, and the servant songs sit inside a book about exile and return. A Christian who treats the Jewish reading as obviously dishonest has not read Isaiah carefully. The honest question is not whether Israel is ever the servant; Isaiah says it plainly, but whether the servant of chapter 53 in particular behaves like the nation or like someone distinguished from it.

Inside the song, the speaker keeps separating the servant from the group:

• The servant is “cut off from the land of the living” for the transgression of “my people” (Isaiah 53:8). The nation does not naturally suffer for its own sins on behalf of itself; here one party is struck for another.
• Two songs earlier, the servant’s job is to “bring Jacob back” and be “a light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:5-6); a mission to Israel that national Israel cannot perform upon itself.
• The servant is innocent; he “had done no injustice and had spoken no falsehood” (Isaiah 53:9, JPS); while Isaiah elsewhere indicts the nation’s guilt at length. A sinless sufferer is a strange portrait of a people Isaiah calls “laden with iniquity.”

None of this requires a Christian lens. It is the grammar of the passage: an individual, righteous servant bearing what is owed by “my people.”

The song does not stop at suffering. The servant is “taken away” by oppressive judgment, “cut off from the land of the living,” and assigned a grave “with the rich, in his death” (Isaiah 53:8-9). That is death, plainly stated. Yet the very next lines turn: he will “see offspring and have long life,” he will see light and “be satisfied,” and he will be given “the many as his portion” (Isaiah 53:10-12).

Death followed by long life and reward is not the shape of a nation slowly recovering from exile; it is the shape of one who dies and is then raised and rewarded. Even in the Jewish translation the vicarious note is unmistakable; wounded for our sins, healed by his bruises. That is precisely the pattern the gospel claims for Jesus’ death and resurrection, the case made in the resurrection as messianic vindication.

It is sometimes said that no Jew ever read this passage of an individual Messiah until Christians forced it. That overstates the case. The ancient Aramaic Targum to Isaiah opens this servant song by calling the servant “my servant the Messiah,” and the Talmud and later midrash connect the chapter’s suffering and sickness to the Messiah, even while distributing the suffering differently than Christians do.

So the live dispute is not whether the servant can be the Messiah, but how his suffering works. Christians answer that the one who is “wounded for our transgressions” is the Messiah bearing sin in person, which is why Philip, meeting an official reading this very chapter, “told him the good news about Jesus” starting from it (Acts 8:30-35).

The permanence language is real and should be granted, not waved away. But the prophet who announces a “new covenant” is not a Christian apostle; he is Jeremiah, speaking to Israel, and he names the parties himself: the House of Israel and the House of Judah. Whatever “everlasting Torah” means, the Hebrew Bible’s own prophet did not think it ruled out a covenant he called new. So the concept is internal to Israel’s Scriptures. The argument cannot be that “new covenant” is a foreign idea; the work is to ask what kind of newness Jeremiah meant.

Read the promise itself and the discontinuity is carefully limited:

• It is “not like the covenant” Israel broke; the contrast is with the ruptured Sinai relationship, not with God’s commitment.
• God puts his Torah “into their inmost being” and writes it “upon their hearts”; the law is internalized, not discarded (Jeremiah 31:33).
• “I will be their God, and they shall be My people”; the relationship continues unbroken.
• “I will forgive their iniquities, and remember their sins no more”; the new element is decisive forgiveness.

This is the same promise the prophets make elsewhere: a circumcised heart (Deuteronomy 30:6), a new heart and God’s Spirit within (Ezekiel 36:26-27). The “new” covenant is the Torah brought inside and sin finally dealt with; God keeping Israel, not trading her in.

The Hebrew word often rendered “forever” marks the abiding, God-guaranteed validity of a covenant in its era; it does not promise that its outward administration never develops. The proof is internal to Judaism itself. When the Temple fell, the “everlasting” sacrificial commands could no longer be performed as written, and Judaism transformed their observance into prayer, study, and acts of mercy. A tradition that has itself re-administered “everlasting” commands after the loss of the Temple cannot consistently insist that “everlasting” must mean “this exact administration, unchanged, forever.” The new covenant is precisely the development the prophets foretold.

The Christian claim, argued carefully, is that the new covenant completes the Torah’s own trajectory; forgiveness, an inward heart, the Spirit, and so displays God’s faithfulness rather than denying it. The same God who spoke at Sinai “has spoken to us by His Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2); the God of Sinai is the God of Calvary, keeping the very promise he made through Jeremiah. And it is made with Israel first: Paul insists God has not rejected his people and that gentiles are grafted into Israel’s olive tree, not substituted for it (Romans 11:17-29). This is the case developed in the new covenant promised in the prophets.

Begin where the objector begins, and mean it: there is one God, and Christianity stands or falls with that confession. We are not adding a second god beside the LORD, nor worshiping a man we promoted to godhood. Those would be idolatry, and Scripture is right to forbid them.

Watch what Paul does with the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6. Surrounded by Corinth’s many “gods” and “lords,” he takes Israel’s confession, the LORD our God, the LORD is one, and writes Jesus into it: “one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” He is not breaking the Shema in two; he is locating Jesus inside the identity of the one God it names. That is the whole Christian claim in miniature: identity, not addition.

Deuteronomy 6:4 uses echad, “one.” Elsewhere echad describes a unity made of parts: a man and his wife become “one [echad] flesh” (Genesis 2:24), and the spies carry “one [echad] cluster” of grapes. The word does not, by itself, define the inner life of God as a bare mathematical point.

Be careful here: echad does not prove plurality, and you should not claim it does. The honest point is narrower: the Torah’s word for God’s oneness does not exclude differentiation within the one God. The insistence that the unity must be yachid, an absolute solitary singularity, is largely a medieval philosophical refinement (Maimonides, twelfth century), sharpened partly in response to Christianity. The biblical text itself leaves a question its later interpreters tried to close.

Long before the New Testament, the Tanakh presents a God whose unity is richer than a point:

• The Angel of the LORD is both distinct from God and spoken of as God: he speaks as the LORD to Hagar (Genesis 16), is the LORD in the burning bush (Exodus 3), and receives worship no mere angel may take.
• Daniel 7:13–14 shows “one like a son of man” coming with the clouds of heaven, a divine prerogative, and receiving everlasting dominion and the service of all peoples, language reserved for God.
• Zechariah 12:10: the LORD says the people “will look on me, the one they have pierced,” and mourn.

Second-Temple Judaism had categories for complexity within the divine: Word, Wisdom, Spirit, Glory. Later rabbis worried enough about a “two powers in heaven” reading to rule it out. The Christian claim is that the New Testament fills these contours in, drawing on Israel’s own Scriptures rather than importing a foreign god. Richard Bauckham calls this including Jesus within the divine identity. Larry Hurtado shows it expressed in the worship of Jesus by Jews who never stopped reciting the Shema.

“God is not a man” in Numbers 23:19 denies that God is fickle, deceitful, and creaturely like a man. It is about God’s faithfulness, not a metaphysical ban on his ever taking up human nature. The same Scriptures show the LORD walking in Eden, appearing to Abraham, and filling the tabernacle with his Glory. The God of Israel is not too holy to draw near; that is the whole story of the dwelling-presence.

The incarnation is not a mortal climbing up into divinity, nor God ceasing to be God. It is the one God personally present, the eternal Word taking on flesh without subtracting anything from what makes him God. Michael Brown’s long engagement with Jewish objections makes the case from the Tanakh’s own theophanies and messianic texts. This is a family argument over Israel’s Scriptures. See Jesus is God and Jesus and messianic prophecy, not a pagan intrusion.

Honesty first: almah denotes a young woman of marriageable age, and Hebrew has a more technical word, betulah, available when strict virginity is in view. By itself the word almah does not prove virginity, and the Jewish translation of the verse is a legitimate rendering of the Hebrew. A Christian who rests the whole doctrine on the lexicon of one word has built on sand, and the objector is right to test the foundation. The way to answer is not to overclaim the word but to show where the weight actually rests.

Two facts keep the lexical question from settling the matter:

• In its biblical uses, almah refers to a young, unmarried woman, and in that culture an unmarried young woman was presumed a virgin. There is no clear biblical case of almah used of a married or non-virgin woman.
• More decisively, Jewish translators rendered almah as parthenos; “virgin”, in the Greek Septuagint roughly two centuries before Jesus was born.

That second point is easy to forget and hard to overstate. The “virgin” reading of Isaiah 7:14 is not a Christian retrofit; it is a pre-Christian Jewish translation choice. Matthew inherited it from the Jewish Bible of his day rather than inventing it.

Prophetic signs in Isaiah often work on two horizons at once. There is an immediate fulfillment; a child born in Ahaz’s lifetime whose growth measures the short time until the threat passes (Isaiah 7:16). But Isaiah does not drop the theme there. He keeps developing “Immanuel” into the next chapters (Isaiah 8:8) and builds toward a child who is called “Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace,” reigning on David’s throne forever (Isaiah 9:6-7). No eighth-century baby fulfilled that. The Immanuel sign is the seed of a royal-child theme that outgrows Ahaz’s moment, and Matthew reads the near sign as patterned toward its greater realization.

Here is the decisive point for any conversation: the virgin birth is not established by Isaiah 7:14 standing alone, and Christians should stop arguing as though it were. The doctrine rests on the Gospel testimony to Jesus’ birth; Matthew and Luke report it independently; set within the whole case for who Jesus is: his life, his claims, his death, and his resurrection. Matthew cites Isaiah 7:14 as a fulfillment pattern, a greater Immanuel, not as a lone proof-text. So the almah question is a real and worthwhile translation discussion, but it is not the hinge of the faith, and treating it as such concedes the objector’s framing. The larger case is made in Jesus and messianic prophecy.