Israel was under Egyptian and later Assyrian control through most of pre-Biblical times. Coming around the time of King Josiah, both Egypt and Assyrian control faltered and Israeli nationalism surged. The King started a process of migrating the tribes towards supporting Yahweh as the pre-eminent deity among them all (or maybe just moving to a shared name for the god, rather than each tribe having their own name for the pre-eminent deity - Qos, Ba’al, Amur, Moloch, Chemosh, etc.)
Josiah and his lead priest, Hilkiah, started writing the Bible.
But, shortly after, the Babylonian empire surged and took over Israel. They grabbed up most of the leadership and intelligentsia of Israel and transported them to the Media.
The ruler of Medes ended up becoming a local badass, Cyrus the Great, and established an empire - the Achaemenid Empire - and toppled the Babylonians. He returned the Israelite leaders to Israel and granted them religious freedom, helped finance the reconstruction of their temples, and required minimal patronage.
The Book of Isaiah seems to have been written in two parts (chapters 1-39 and 40-66. In the earlier part, when it’s talking about a great, amazing person who is of the line of David, the most likely reading is that they’re referring to King Josiah. In the second part, it is referring to Cyrus the Great.
I’m going to say that Moses, Samuel, and Elijah are not in the same category as Isaiah. They were sacred heroes more than they were prophets. Also they were written about, they were not writers themselves. The books written about them are presented as histories. Isaiah didn’t compose all of the Book of Isaiah but he did write most of it, and it’s mostly presented as prophecy, as I recall. Probably a good deal of it after it happened. He was an advisor to the king and the king didn’t take his advice. Bad things ensued.
When Judas brought the Roman guard to the garden at Gethsemane to arrest him, he had to go to him and point him out, cause all those Hebrews looked alike, y’know?
14 His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; 15 And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.
The Jesus appearing to John is no longer human, but in what is called his glorified form. The images are symbolic, meaning that you can read almost anything you want into them, and the translation given is the King James, with others not mentioning his head and using bronze instead of brass for the feet.
Nevertheless, this is the only biblical description I’m familiar with, so taking it into some account is mandatory if you’re going to play the game.
Isaiah the book of the Bible (as opposed to Isaiah the person) is part of the group of Bible books sometimes referred to as the Major Prophets, so-called because they are longer than the “Minor Prophets.” Isaiah being the longest, and possibly the most important in other respects, there’s a sense in which I think it’s fair to refer to Isaiah as the “greatest of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures.”
Yes. More information can be found in the Wikipedia article on the genealogy of Jesus; but the issue is tangential to the point of this thread, I think.
Ah, I see. According to Jewish classification, all of the books from Joshua to Malachi - 21 in total - are referred to as the Books of the Prophets, or Nevi’im.
As I’ve said before, IMO the most accurate portrayal of Jesus was Jeff Goldblum in The Favor, The Watch And The Very Big Fish. Go a few shades darker and it would be perfect.
Actually, looking specifically at 52:13-53:12, I don’t believe that it’s talking about Cyrus.
I see some arguments that it’s about Israel, personified. If not, I’d probably go with Gedalia. He does seem to have been punished for nothing. But it’s possibly a reference to someone who we have lost record of.
David was (per the Hebrew scriptures) the great-granddaughter of Ruth - a non-Israelite from the people of Moab, a people considered by the Israelites to be inferior and impure
We had a guest speaker when I was in middle school who quoted that passage… as evidence that Jesus was black. “His hair was like wool-- Well, obviously black people have wooly hair, so that must mean Jesus was black!”
At the time, I wasn’t as familiar with Bible verses as I am now, but even then, I could tell that my hair could just as accurately be described as “wooly” as that of any of my darker-skinned classmates.
I’ve also seen the brass or bronze feet mentioned in 1:15 used as evidence of Jesus’ blackness. How that could be squared with the whiteness in 1:14 was never explained, although perhaps the lack of the word head in some translations allows an out.
Still, reading “white like wool, as white as snow” and ignoring that the color, not the texture, is being emphasized is a good example of starting with one’s conclusion and then working to develop evidence to prove it, a trap that most biblical exegesis eventually falls into.
There must have been a certain amount of human migration between the Roman Empire, including Palestine, where most people are, at least today, white, and areas of Africa where we would say the people there are Black.
I know the absence of evidence doesn’t prove anything, but it may be the best evidence we have. And that evidence tells me that the authors of the Bible didn’t pay much attention to skin color. They had to know of it, and, can you imagine, didn’t think Jesus’s skin color, or lips, were important.
No, anybody who has antecedents from anywhere Rome had its army and auxilliaries, there is a not insignificant chance they have African colonial and Levantine auxiliary blood. Humans being humans, we screw every chance we get, and pregnancy was not impossible in an era with a distinct lack of dependable birth control.
And as Jefferson was known to have a slave mistress, and it is documented she had children 4 of the 6 were considered to be his children [I had found the names of 4] so if they had had children, then Jefferson would have had partly black descendents.
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