mredd wrote:The notion of prophetic "dual fulfillment" is only a figment of the Christian apologist's and missionary's mind. Remember, Young was a Christian whose agenda was to justify his beliefs. This is only possible by crafting this sort of an artifact, which is unbiblical. There is no evidence anywhere in the Hebrew Bible that prophecies have been fulfilled more than once.
"To argue that Hebrew had no future tense doesn't solve anything as far as this passage is concerned, because Hebrew writers relied on past tense when they wanted to convey the certainty of the future. Young explained this in the introduction to his literal translation:
The Hebrew writers often express the "certainty of a thing taking place" by putting it in the "past" tense, though the actual fulfillment may not take place for ages. This is easily understood and appreciated when the language is used by God, as when he says, in Gen. xv.18, "Unto thy seed I have given this land"; and in xvii.4, "I, lo, my covenant is with thee, and thou hast become a father of a multitude of nations." ... Again in 2 Kings v.6, the King of Syria, writing to the King of Israel, says: "Lo, I have sent unto thee Naaman, my servant, and thou hast recovered him from leprosy" (original emphasis). "
Greetings people
The missionary i am conversing with assumes that Y'shayahu 7:14 was put in the "prophetic past tense" using youngs argument above.Strange thing is that he acknowledges that the prophecy was CONTEMPORARily fullfilled and fullfilled in the FUTURE.
Does this mean that there was 2 "prophetic past tenses" in Y'shayahu 7:14 ?
It should be noted that the Christian claim of a "dual fulfillment" fails here simply for the following reason: What makes the claimed "second fulfillment" (i.e., the alleged "virgin birth" of yeshu) more special than the the one described in Isaiah 7:14? And, since King Solomon said that "there is nothing new under the sun", it is certainly possible that more such births occurred before and after this one.
UriYosef
