January 25th, 2020

For the gospel text this Sunday, the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, we are going back to the Gospel according to Matthew, where we started at the beginning of the church year. But now we are at the fourth chapter [verses 12-25], and we will go on from there for the next few weeks.

All throughout this gospel account, the connections to the Old Testament are strong, and that makes sense, since this is the first book of the New Testament. And the way in which this writer connects his work to the Old Testament is fascinating.

The first Old Testament fulfillment prophecy within this gospel account has to do with the virgin giving birth to a son, Immanuel (1:23), and I have already mentioned before that this special verse in Isaiah (7:14) is at the center of the first main section in Isaiah. But I do not think I mentioned these words of the author of The Book Around Immanuel: Style and Structure in Isaiah 2-12 [Andrew Bartelt, Eisenbrauns, 1996, page 256]: “The break between [‘and she will call his name’] and [‘Immanuel’] divides chaps. 2-12 into equal halves of 3200 syllables.” Can you believe that?!

Another fulfillment prophecy that I wrote about quite recently was the one concerning Jesus as a Nazarene (2:23). I mentioned that this prophecy is unique in that it seems that the writer does not have simply one prophet in mind. Matthew says that the action of Jesus living in Nazareth means that there are prophets, in the plural, whose prophecies were fulfilled by that action.

Although it is impossible to say what the writer intended or what he had in mind—because we cannot interview him today, and we are not mind-readers anyway, something in the mind needs to be articulated to be shared—one thing I would like to mention here is that the writer MAY be pointing to the following two ‘prophets’: Samson, because he had a Nazirite vow—and that word is close to Nazareth (Judges 13), and Isaiah, specifically his prophecy that a shoot would come forth from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11)—since the Hebrew word ‘shoot’ is close to the word Nazareth.

Now if those two things were ‘in mind’, there would be a nice structure to this prophecy, in a somewhat similar pattern to the structure that is found in an Old Testament book like Leviticus and a New Testament epistle like Hebrews. These two writings have a structure that is like a one-third/two-thirds structure, like that of the tabernacle or temple, if you would be looking down at it from above. There would be the place for offerings at the one-third spot, and there would be the holy of holies at the two-thirds spot. [For more detail on this topic, see “The Structure of Hebrews: A Word of Exhortation in Light of the Day of Atonement”, in A Cloud of Witnesses: The Theology of Hebrews in its Ancient Contexts, T & T Clark, 2008, pages 20-22.] Both the tabernacle and the temple are gone, but a reminder of those structures continues with the literary structures of some significant texts in the scriptures.

With the book of Judges, we are a significant distance from the beginning of the Old Testament, and with the book of Isaiah, we are at similar distance from the end of the Old Testament. To give you an idea of the approximate distance, the English Standard Version Bible that I was looking at [copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles] just had the basic text—it was not like a study bible which can have very little text and very many notes. This version of the bible had the story of Samson starting on page 255. And the prophecy of Isaiah which dealt with the branch was on page 695, and the Old Testament stopped on page 970, about 275 pages later. The difference between 255 pages and 275 pages is not that much, especially when considering that Isaiah continues for many more pages after chapter 11.

Another interesting point to be made is that, if there is a one-third and two-thirds division within a literary work, you may think of the ‘opposite ends’ of those divisions as being at the following three points in the writing: the beginning, the middle, and the end. And the middle point is probably the most important point to point out, since it usually goes unnoticed; the beginning and the end are always noticed. And usually there is something at the beginning that indicates the important middle, so it is not missed.

The type of structure where there is a significant change in the middle may be seen in several places within both testaments, and I believe I have mentioned these examples before: The second creation account in Genesis, chapter 2, has a negative-positive structure, with its turning point being the ‘face’ of the ground, with the word ‘face’ appearing near the beginning of the first creation account to give you a hint as to its importance. Within the first chapter of 1 Timothy, from verses 3 through 17, there are a series of negatives, and then the turning point is the gospel of the glory of the blessed God (verse 11), with the gospel being brought up at the beginning of the epistle with references to Jesus and grace.

The prophecy fulfillment that is brought up in the text for this coming Sunday may also have that same pattern behind it. Finding a pattern does NOT prove that it is the intention of the author—as I indicated above. It DOES mean that we still have much more work to do on these texts. Dividing the text by chapter and verse is a very artificial way of looking at the text. The writers just had the text to work with, and usually this meant not even having spaces between the words; paper was an extremely valuable thing. And the words of the text were—and still are—extremely valuable, even priceless.

The writer makes the point of Jesus living in Capernaum by the sea, and the writer connects this to the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, and he writes the following:
And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: ‘The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.’
Could this prophecy be the center of a section within this book? It could be. In front of the above text is another reference to Immanuel at 8:10. And, after this text, there is a refrain that appears elsewhere in this book (5:25; 10:4), and it has the word ‘not’ in it. It is in 9:11b—which in the English translations is at 12b.
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There are six times that the word ‘not’ is used, but only in the first half of this section (from 8:11 to 9:11a; the word ‘not’ is in the original language and may not appear in the translation). Another interesting thing is that there are 148 words to the first word of our quotation above, and then there are 148 words from that point to the end of that section. Even if this is a coincidence, the New Testament text is extremely important; it appreciates the Old Testament, but, more importantly, it gives us a new start in Jesus Christ. ‘The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light….’