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Whose Child Is This? Reflections on the Speaking Voice in Isaiah 9:5Author(s): J. J. M. RobertsSource: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 115-129Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1510068Accessed: 19/11/2008 15:09

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Whose Child Is This? Reflections on the Speaking Voice in Isaiah 9:5*

J. J. M. Roberts Princeton Theological Seminary

n his 1947 article, "Das judaische Konigsritual," Gerhard von Rad ar- gued that the Judean enthronement ritual was heavily dependent on the

corresponding Egyptian ritual.1 He argued persuasively that the pn of Ps 2:7, the nmn of 2 Kgs 11:12, and the n"nn of Ps 89:40 were all simply different designations of the same reality, the Judean counterpart of the Egyptian nhb.t, the royal protocol that the deity writes and presents to the new king along with the crown at the time of the latter's coronation.2 The Egyptian protocol contained the five names of the new pharaoh's titulary and the legitimation of his rule by the deity's acknowledgment of the king as the deity's child. Von Rad argued that both of these elements also ap- peared in the Judean ritual. Ps 2:7 quotes from the protocol marking Yahweh's legitimation of the new Davidic king as God's son, while Isa 9:5 reflects the king's divine sonship as well as his five-fold royal titulary. In

*An abbreviated version of this paper was presented in the Egyptology and the History and Culture of Ancient Israel Group at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, New Orleans, November 23, 1996.

'Gerhard von Rad, "Das judaische Konigsritual," ThLZ 72/4 (1947) 211-16. 2Ibid., 213-15.

HTR 90:2 (1997) 115-29

116 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

making this argument, von Rad suggested that the speaker in Isa 9:5 was not the people, but the deity.3 In 1950, von Rad's teacher Albrecht Alt, published his justly famous study, "Befreiungsnacht und Kronungstag," in which he'applied von Rad's insights to Isa 8:23-9:6 in great detail.4 He argued that the Isaiah passage was composed for Hezekiah's enthronement, that it reflected the strong influence of Egyptian enthronement rituals, that verse 5 referred not to the birth of an actual child but to the legitimation of the new king at his coronation, and that the names are enthronement names parallel to the fivefold titulary of the Egyptian kings. Alt differed from von Rad, however, in identifying the "we" in verse 5, not as the deity but as heralds whom the Judean royal court sent to the former Israelite territories in the north in an attempt to lure them into joining Judah in accepting Hezekiah as their king.5

* Contemporary Critique of the Alt-von Rad Consensus Despite this slight difference in understanding, these two studies created

an impressive consensus that dominated the interpretation of the Isaiah passage for a significant period. Certain weaknesses in presentation, how- ever, left their general understanding of the passage open to criticism. In recent years critics have begun to erode the older consensus by attacking these vulnerable spots. It is, nonetheless, my contention that von Rad was fundamentally correct in his assessment of the Isaiah passage and that the apparent points of vulnerability are simply the result of von Rad failing to push his insights far enough.

While both Alt and von Rad emphasized the Egyptian influence on the Judean enthronement ritual, both also drew a sharp distinction between the Egyptian and Judean conceptions of the human king's divine sonship.6 According to them, Egyptians understood the coronation announcement that the deity had begotten the new king mythologically: the king was the actual physical offspring of the deity and therefore shared the divine nature. In Judah, by contrast, that announcement was a legal formula of adoption. The Davidic king was not the physical offspring of Yahweh but merely the god's "adopted" son. This approach to understanding the language of Ps 2:7

3Ibid., 216. 4Albrecht Alt, "Jesaja 8, 23-9, 6. Befreiungsmacht und Kronungstag," in Walter Baumgartner,

ed., Festschrift Alfred Bertholet zum 80. Geburtstag gewidmet (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1950) 29-49; reprinted in Albrecht Alt, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte des Volkes Israel (3 vols.; Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1953) 2. 206-25.

5Alt, "Befreiungsmacht und Kronungstag," 44-45 (= idem, Kleine Schriften, 2. 221-22). 6Von Rad, "Das judaische Konigsritual," 214; Alt, "Befreiungsmacht und Kronungstag,"

42-43 (= idem, Kleine Schriften, 2. 218-19).

J. J. M. ROBERTS 117

seemed to work well there,7 but it did provide an opening for critics to attack von Rad and Alt's understanding of the sonship language of Isa 9:5.

Isa 9:5 differs from Ps 2:7 in employing the passive construction and in the use of the noun T'* ("child") for the offspring of the deity. Many scholars who were willing to understand the statement in Ps 2:7 as an adoption formula could not see the Isaiah formulation in the same light.8 According to these critics, in the accession oracle God speaks directly to the king, and the term r'* never applies to an adult king.9 Adoption lan- guage, moreover, is always active, whereas the passive form commonly refers to actual physical birth. Pushing this argument even further, Simon Parker has pointed out that Isa 9:5 evidences features of the traditional birth announcement, a fact that he thinks lends further support to the argu- ments against the adoptionist-coronation interpretation of the Isaiah pas- sage.10

Still another significant objection to von Rad's interpretation is that he had to assume a change of speaker at vs. 5. Verses 2-3 address Yahweh in the second person, but according to von Rad the deity is the speaker in vs. 5.11 Yet there is no orthographic marker in the text to indicate this shift in speaker.

R. A. Carlson12 and, after him, Paul Wegner13 also object that von Rad and Alt vastly overstated the Egyptian background to the royal names, suggesting that they more closely resemble Assyrian material. This asser- tion does not create serious problems for von Rad's thesis because it is patently false. Carlson's treatment of the Akkadian royal epithets as the background for the names in Isa 9:5 is hardly compelling. He quickly dismisses the explanation of the peculiar orthography in Isa 9:6 as evidence

7This understanding of Ps 2:7 appears already in Hermann Gunkel, Ausgewdhlte Psalmen iibersetzt und erkldrt (3d ed.; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1911) 13-14.

8Hans-Joachim Kraus, "Jesaja 9, 5-6 (6-7)," in Georg Eichholz, ed., Herr, tue Meine Lippen auf: Eine Predigthilfe, 5 (Wuppertal: Muller, 1961) 43-53; Theodor Lescow, "Das Geburtsmotiv in den messianischen Weissagungen bei Jesaja und Micha," ZAW 79 (1967) 172-207; Dieter Vieweger, "'Das Volk, das durch das Dunkel zieht.. .': Neue Uberlegungen zu Jes (8, 23a3b) 9, 1-6," BZ n.s. 36/1 (1992) 77-86; and Paul D. Wegner, "A Re-Examina- tion of Isaiah IX 1-6," VT 42 (1992) 103-12.

9Kraus, "Jesaja 9, 5-6 (6-7)," 47; Lescow, "Das Geburtsmotiv," 182-84; Vieweger, "'Das Volk, das durch das Dunkel zieht... '," 82; Wegner, "A Re-examination," 104.

I?Simon B. Parker, "The Birth Announcement," in Lyle Eslinger and Glen Taylor, eds., Ascribe to the Lord: Biblical & Other Studies in Memory of Peter C. Craigie (JSOTSup 67; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988) 137.

" Von Rad, "Das judaische Konigsritual," 216. '2R. A. Carlson, "The Anti-Assyrian Character of the Oracle in Is. IX 1-6," VT 24 (1974)

130-35. '3Wegner, "A Re-examination," 105.

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for a missing fifth name, though he offers no adequate explanation for the peculiar orthography.14 Then he makes the presence of only four names significant for Isaiah's purpose. According to him, the prophet uses four names in response to the Assyrian king's claim to be "king of the four quarters."'5There is absolutely nothing in the names themselves to suggest such a connection. Carlson then argues that the name pele' yo'es ("wonder- ful counselor") is a pun on the Assyrian king's name Tiglat pil'eser,'6 but the two names have only the faintest resemblance to one another, and even then only if one ignores the first part of the Assyrian king's name. Carlson also argues with regard to the name 7'"rn ("father of eternity") that the epithet abu ("father") is proper to the Akkadian royal titulary, citing a text from Hammurabi. According to Carlson, "Tiglath-pileser may be termed abu, the heir of David is 'abi-'ad, 'father forever'.""17 Isaiah, however, lived a thousand years after Hammurabi, and a search of Tiglath-pileser's inscrip- tions suggests the absence of abu among his royal epithets. Carlson asserts that his "interpretation of the Messianic titelage [sic]. . . presupposes a thorough acquaintance, on the prophet's part, with these epithets attached to the Assyrian king, namely Tiglath-pileser,"18 but Carlson's article gives no evidence that he investigated what epithets Tiglath-pileser actually used. The most one can say for Carlson's effort is that a certain very general resemblance exists between the ideas about kingship in Judah and Assyria, but one could say the same thing for Babylon, the Hittite kingdom, Ugarit, and Egypt. The actual names in Isa 9:5, however, are far more similar (both in their syntactical structure and in their meaning) to those occurring in the Egyptian royal titularies than to the royal epithets in Akkadian, Hittite, or Ugaritic texts.

* Adoption and Adoption Formulae To return to the more difficult problem, then, how is one to account for

the linguistic differences between Isa 9:5 and Ps 2:7? The problem arises from the generally held assumption that the statement in Ps 2:7, "You are my son, today I have begotten you," is a legal formula of adoption. None- theless, despite the ubiquity of this claim in the secondary literature, the evidence for the claim is not impressive. The meager evidence has been conveniently assembled in two recent studies by Shalom M. Paul19 and

'4Carlson, "The Anti-Assyrian Character," 131-32. 5Ibid., 133.

16Ibid., 133. 7Ibid., 134.

'8Ibid., 134. 19Shalom M. Paul, "Adoption Formulae: A Study of Cuneiform and Biblical Legal Clauses,"

Maarav 2/2 (1979-80) 173-85.

J. J. M. ROBERTS 119

Jeffrey H. Tigay.20 Before looking at this evidence in detail, however, one should note how foreign the metaphor of adoption was to Israel's own culture. As Paul notes, "no laws pertaining to adoption are found in the biblical legal corpora,"21 and as Tigay observes, "the very institution of adoption was rare-if at all existent-in Israel."22 One may well ask, then, where an Israelite or Judean theologian of the royal court would find the necessary model for the adoption metaphor.

In any case, when turning to the formulae actually attested in adoption contracts, one finds ample attestation of solemn declarations of the disso- lution of adoptive ties. The adoption contracts often spell out the penalty if the adoptive parent renounces the adopted child or if the adopted child renounces the adoptive parent or parents. Thus the renunciation formulae ul mart atta ("you are not my son"), ul abi atta ("you are not my father"), and ul ummi atfi ("you are not my mother") are extremely common in the documents. Despite the impression that the secondary literature leaves, however, positive declarations associated with the creation of adoptive ties are very rare, if attested at all. Scholars originally assumed the existence of such positive declarations simply on the basis of the negative declarations actually attested. Martin David in his fundamental work on Old Babylonian adoption thus argued from these negative declarations

that in connection with the dissolution (of an adoptive relationship) originally specific formal expressions will have been used. If this is correct, however, it allows one to suppose that also in connection with the entrance into the adoptive relationships corresponding phrases have found employment; in other words, that the adoption contract possibly has been connected originally with the saying of solemn declarations. In connection with a giving into adoption this may have been some- thing like: "You are his father, you are my child;" when an Arrogation (adoption of an adult) was involved: "You are my father," or "you are my child."23

David went on to admit, however, that these suppositions were purely hypothetical until one could find textual sources to support them.24 David

20Jeffrey H. Tigay, "Adoption," EncJud (1971) 2. 300-1. 21Paul, "Adoption Formulae," 173. 22Tigay, "Adoption," 300-1. 23Martin David, Die Adoption im altbabylonischen Recht (Leipziger Rechtswissenschaftliche

Studien, 23; Leipzig: Weicher, 1927) 79. 24Interestingly, he refused to attach much weight to Kohler's attempt to find such support

in the formulaic language of Ps 2:7 ("you are my son, today I have begotten you") and Hos 2:1 ("you are not my people") since the dependency of these expressions on the Old Babylonian outlook was by no means obvious. Ibid., 79, n. 42.

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could only find two examples of such positive formulations in the Akkadian texts, and Paul in his recent summary article has only been able to add one more. I shall look at these examples in some detail but will state at the outset that none of these examples contains the positive formula atta marl ("you are my son"), allegedly the background to Ps 2:7.

The closest approximation to this formulation is found in the Code of Hammurabi I 170:37-59:

If a man's wife bore him children and his female slave also bore him children, if the father during his lifetime has ever said, maru(DuMuME )- u-a (qi170:45), "My children!" to the children whom the slave bore him, thus having counted them with the children of the first wife, after the father has gone to (his) fate, the children of the first wife and the children of the slave shall share equally in the goods of the paternal estate, with the firstborn, the son of the first wife, receiving a prefer- ential share.25

On a formal level, the formulation in the Code of Hammurabi lacks the second person independent pronoun, but more substantively, the children in this text are the physical offspring of the speaker. Taking this passage as the background to Ps 2:7 could well allow one to read the formula in the Psalm not as an attempt to deny the physical engenderment of the king by Yahweh but as an acknowledgment and legitimation of the physical kinship between Yahweh and the king that had existed even prior to this legitima- tion.

David's second example appears in an Old Babylonian contract in which a certain Zuhuntum had handed over her child to the priestess Iltani for wet-nursing.26 When Zuhuntum was unable to pay the fee for three years of wet-nursing, she said to Iltani, "Take the child. Let him be your son" (tabli suharam lu maruki).27 Iltani apparently agreed, paid Zuhuntum three shekels over and above the unpaid fee for three years of wet-nursing, and thus sealed the contract. One should note that the expression li maruki ("let him be your son") is in the third person and is spoken not by the adoptive parent but by the biological parent. It may be a solemn formula- though it could just as easily be an ordinary expression-but it is not a striking parallel to Ps 2:7. Iltani apparently never said to the child during the adoption proceedings, "You are my son!" (atta marn).

25Author's adaptation of Theophile J. Meeks translation in ANET (3d ed.; 1969) 173. 26Arthur B. Ungnad, Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Ber-

lin (Leipzig: Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1909) 6, nos. 10-11. 27Ibid., no. 10.10-11, no. 11.8-9.

J. J. M. ROBERTS 121

The third example, which Paul (following Weinfeld)28 adds, occurs in the Hittite-Akkadian bilingual of Hattu?ili? I.29 This text describes the king's adoption of an appropriate successor. Because of conflict within his family, Hattu?ilig had disowned his sons and his original heir, the son of his sister, and chosen instead Mur?ili? I, perhaps a grandson, to be the heir to his throne. With regard to his ultimately disinherited nephew, Hattu?ili? said to his council of nobles, "Now I had named to you the young Labarna. Let him sit on the throne. I, the king, have called him son."30 Later to the same council of nobles he said of Murkilia, "[Now Mur?ilig is my son. You must acknowledge] him [and put] him [on the throne]."31 While this text does contain two notices of adoption, neither corresponds to Psalm 2. Both of Hattu?ilig's statements address the council of nobles, and the references to the adopted sons are third-person references, not second-person address as in Ps 2:7. To repeat, there is as yet no real parallel in the Mesopotamian adoption texts to the positive, second-person formulation of Ps 2:7.

Ps 2:7, moreover, continues with the statement, "today I have begotten you," and one can probably reconstruct the same verbal expression in Ps 110:3, a related coronation psalm. If the expression, "you are my son," is an adoption formula, then how is one to explain, "today I have begotten you"? Tigay understands all of this as part of the adoption formula. "To- day" he explains as a typical date formula, and says, "the next phrase may reflect the conception of adoption as a new birth .. ."32 His explanation, however, is very dubious. Whatever one may make of the simple use of "today" as a date formula, the Akkadian verb waladu ("to give birth"), the equivalent of Hebrew yalad, never appears in any Akkadian adoption con- tract. Since Tigay admits that adoption was not a widespread practice in Israel, if it existed at all, whence does this peculiar use of birth language as a metaphor for adoption come? It does not come from Akkadian adop- tion texts.

Both Paul and Tigay follow Weinfeld in arguing that the source of this adoption language imagery is the covenants of royal grant.33 This move,

28Moshe Weinfeld, "The Covenant of Grant in the Old Testament and in the Ancient Near East," JAOS 90 (1970) 191; Paul, "Adoption Formulae," 179.

29Ferdinand Sommer and Adam Falkenstein, Die Hethitisch-Akkadische Bilingue des Hattusili I. (Labarna II.) (Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch- Historische Abteilung, n.s. 16; Munich: Verlag der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1938).

30a-nu-um-ma TUR-am la-ba-ar-na [aq-bji-a-ak-ku-nu-si-im su-u li-it-ta-sa-ab-mi LUGAL- ru [al-]si-su-ma DUMU(?)-am. Ibid., Text A I, 2-4.

31[a-nu-um-ma 'mu-ur-si-li DUMU-ri d su-wa-a-tu lu-u ti-da-a a] su-wa-a-tu [su-si-ba]. The restoration is based on the parallel Hittite lines. Ibid., Text A, I 37-38.

32Tigay, "Adoption," 300. 33Weinfeld, "Covenant of Grant," 184-203; idem, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic

122 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

however, does not solve the problem with the birth language ("I have begotten you"), for one still finds no example of waladu as a metaphorical way of expressing this new adoptive relationship to the vassal even in such covenants of grant. In fact, one should be hesitant to describe the meta- phorical familial language of the political sphere as adoption language at all. To refer to a suzerain as "father," a vassal as "son," or an ally as "brother" characterizes in familial terms the nature of the power relation- ship between the two treaty partners, but it does not imply a self-conscious adaptation of technical adoption language. The focus is on the relationship, not its genesis. The suzerain is to behave like a father to the vassal, but that does not imply actual adoption. The frequent attempts to bind the vassal to oneself in an actual family relationship most often took the form of political marriage rather than adoption.

In this connection it is worth looking at several of the key examples that Weinfeld cites of such politically motivated adoption. In discussing the language of Ps 89:21-35, he makes the following claim: "'House' (=dy- nasty), land and peoples are then given to David as a fief and as it was the rule in the second millennium this could be legitimized only by adop- tion."34 To support his claim that a king could only make a land grant in the second millennium through the fiction of adoption, Weinfeld first cites in a footnote the example of Yarim-Lim of Alalah.35 In the texts from Alalah, one finds reference to a Yarim-Lim, son of Abba-El, and a Yarim- Lim, son of Hammurabi. Following Albrecht Alt,36 Weinfeld assumes that these Yarim-Lims are one and the same person. Yarim-Lim's real father was Hammurabi; Abba-El was Yarim-Lim's suzerain, but, according to this thesis, "Abba-El later adopted Yarim-Lim in order to create the legal basis for installing him as king of Haleb."37 This whole reconstruction, however, rests on thin air. In the first place, one should note that Abba-El installed Yarim-Lim as ruler of Alalah long before the assumed adoption took place. This land grant to Yarim-Lim obviously did not need the legitimation of adoption. In the second place, there is no textual reference to any adoption at all: it is just a hypothesis based on the different fathers assigned to Yarim-Lim. There is, however, no compelling reason to assume that one is dealing with a single Yarim-Lim, since that was a very popular name in the region. As both William F. Albright and Horst Klengel have persuasively

School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) 77-81. 34Weinfeld, "Covenant of Grant," 191. 35Ibid., 191, n. 59. 36Albrecht Alt, "Bemerkungen zu den Verwaltungs- und Rechtsurkunden von Ugarit und

Alalach," WO 3 (1964) 14-17. 37Weinfeld, "Covenant of Grant," 191, n. 59.

J. J. M. ROBERTS 123

argued, Abba-El of Aleppo (Haleb) and Yarim-Lim of Alalah were prob- ably brothers, both sons of Hammurabi I of Aleppo, while Yarim-Lim, the son of Abba-El, is probably Yarim-Lim II of Aleppo, the real son of Abba- El and the nephew of Yarim-Lim of Alalah.38 In short, this text cited in Weinfeld's footnote provides no proof of the adoption of a political vassal or of the need for such adoption in order to legitimate a dynastic land grant.

In the text of his article, Weinfeld cites another example to make his point:

That this is really the case here may be learned from the treaty be- tween SuppiluliumaS and Mattiwaza.39 Mattiwaza, in describing how he established relations with Suppiluliumas, says: "(The great king) grasped me with [his ha]nd. .. and said: when I will conquer the land of Mitanni I shall not reject you, I shall make you my son, I will stand by (to help in war) and will make you sit on the throne of your fa- ther. .. the word which comes out of his mouth will not turn back."40

The use Weinfeld makes of this citation is misleading in the extreme. If one did not know better, one might think that the sequence, "I shall make you my son. . . and will make you sit on the throne of your father," meant that Mattiwaza would succeed to the throne of guppiluliumag, his putative adoptive father. Nothing would be further from the truth. Mattiwaza was the son of TuSratta, the king of Mitanni. When Mitanni fell apart after TuSratta's disastrous war against guppiluliumag, TuSratta was assasinated, and Suttarna seized his throne. Escaping an attempt on his life, Mattiwaza was able to flee to Hittite territory where he received asylum from Suppiluliumag. The accounts of these events survive in the texts of the treaty between ?uppiluliumag and Mattiwaza. There are two recensions of

38William F. Albright, "Further Observations on the Chronology of Alalakh," BASOR 146 (1957) 27; Horst Klengel, Geschichte Syriens im 2. Jahrtausend v. u. Z.: Teil I-Nordsyrien (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Institut fur Orientforschung, 40; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1965) 154-55, 208-9.

39There is a debate among contemporary Hittite scholars whether the name Mattiwaza should be read as Kurtiwaza or Sattiwaza, but that debate is irrelevant for my argument, and to avoid introducing unnecessary confusion I have kept without prejudice the older reading that Weinfeld followed. See Emmanuel Laroche, Les noms des Hittites (Etudes Linguistiques IV; Paris: Libraire C. Klincksieck, 1966) 117; Annelies Kammenhuber, Die Arier im Vorder- orient (Heidelberg: Carl Winter/Univeritatsverlag, 1968) 81-84; Guy Kestemont, Diplomatique et droit international en Asie occidentale (1600-1200 av. J.C.) (Publications de l'Institut Orientaliste de Louvain 9; Louvain-La-Neuve: Universitd Catholique de Louvain, Institut Orientaliste, 1974) 92 n. 15.

40Weinfeld, "Covenant of Grant," 191.

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the treaty, one from Mattiwaza's standpoint and one from Suppiluliumag's.41 Weinfeld quotes from Mattiwaza's version, but does not bother to inform the reader that ,uppiluliumag had given his daughter in marriage to Mattiwaza, his new vassal. That is clear from the end of the latter's version of the treaty,42 but it is even clearer from the Suppiluliumag version, which is worth quoting:

After I grasped Mattiwaza, the son of Tusratta, the king, with my hand, I caused him to sit on the throne of his father. In order that the land of Mitanni, the great land, not perish, I the great king, the king of the land of Hatti, revived the land of Mitanni for the sake of my daughter. Mattiwaza, the son of Tusratta, I grasped in my hand, and I gave to him (my) daughter as his wife. And Mattiwaza, the son of the king, shall surely be king in the land of Mitanni, and the daughter of the king of the land of Hatti shall surely be queen in the land of Mitanni.43

The text goes on to forbid Mattiwaza from taking other wives in such a fashion as to diminish the queenly authority of ?uppiluliumag's daughter. One should note that the term "the king" in this text, when otherwise unspecified, refers to the king of Mitanni. In other words, when the text calls Mattiwaza "the son of the king," it is referring to king TuSratta of Mitanni, not Suppiluliumag of Hatti. Contrary to Weinfeld, Mattiwaza's claim on the throne of Mitanni, even if ?uppiluliuman helped him to make that claim a reality, derived from the fact that he was a real son and rightful heir of TuSratta. Mattiwaza's family tie to guppiluliuman, which was based on marriage to the latter's daughter, not Weinfeld's alleged adop- tion, did not bolster his legal claim to the throne of Mitanni. In real adop- tion texts the adopted child inherits the property of his adoptive father, not his biological father; yet Mattiwaza was certainly not a candidate for the Hittite throne.

This shows the danger of putting too much weight on formulaic expres- sions without attention to the larger context. The Akkadian expression Suppiluliumag used in accepting Mattiwaza as a vassal, ana marttiya eppuskami ("I will make you my son"), is an idiom attested in adoption contracts. As the preceding comparison of the two versions of the treaty between ?uppiluliumag and Mattiwaza has nevertheless shown, Suppiluliumag actually brought Mattiwaza into his family legally, not by

41Ernst F. Weidner, Politische Dokumente aus Kleinasien: Die Staatsvertrdge in akkadischer Sprache aus dem Archiv von Boghazkdi (Boghazk6i-Studien, 8; Leipzig: Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1923) 1-37 (=no. 1), 37-57 (=no. 2).

42Weidner, Politische Dokumente, 53 (11.35-39). 43Ibid., 19 (11.56-60).

J. J. M. ROBERTS 125

adopting him, but by marrying him to a royal daughter. Dynastic marriage, not adoption, is the basis for familial language in these treaties.

This stricture is even more relevant with regard to language describing divine-human relationships. Weinfeld says, "HattuSiliS I is similarly de- scribed as adopted and legitimized by the sun goddess of Arinna: 'She put him into her bosom, grasped his hand and ran (in battle) before him'."44 Divine nurture language often depicts the gods' concern for their favorites, but such language is not a part of the legal terminology of adoption; there is then absolutely no justification for asserting that the terminology of divine nurture and protection implies anything about adoption. One must also be very cautious in making claims about divine adoption when dealing with Mesopotamian texts that refer to the king as the "son of such and such deity." In Mesopotamia any person could claim to be the son of his or her personal deity, and Mesopotamians conceived of the personal deity as play- ing an important role in the physical birth of the child. This terminology has therefore little bearing on the question at issue.45

One must emphasize this warning against discovering the adoption meta- phor everywhere that familial language occurs, because biblical scholars have become far too quick to read adoption into any biblical text that speaks of God as a parent, even in texts where the child concerned is not the king but the people of Israel in general. Paul, for example, says, "The nation 'adopted' by God is called 'Israel, my first born son' in Exod 4:22."46 Exod 4:22 says nothing about adoption, however. The text reports God's command to Moses to speak to Pharaoh as follows:

You will say to Pharaoh, thus says Yahweh: "Israel is my first born son, and I said to you, 'Send my son that he may serve me.' But you refused to send him. Now therefore I am about to kill your first born son."47

The text focuses on the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, not on how that relationship came to be. Tigay is far more careful on this point than Paul. He refers to several passages (Exod 4:22; Deut 8:5; 14:1) in speaking of the comparison of the relationship between God and Israel to that of father and son, but he immediately adds, "Usually there is no indi- cation that this is meant in an adoptive sense .. ."48 Some passages may

44Weinfeld, "Covenant of Grant," 192. 45M. J. Seux, Epithetes royales Akkadiennes et Sumeriennes (Paris: Letouzey et Ane,

1967) 159, n. 28. 46Paul, "Adoption Formulae," 178. 47Exod 4:22-23. 48Tigay, "Adoption," 300.

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possibly use adoption language to describe the creation of the parent-child relationship between Yahweh and his people,49 but other texts use the lan- guage of physical birth. Thus Deut 32:18 says, "You were unmindful of the Rock who bore you (yeladeka), and you forgot the God who gave birth to you (mehoelekd)." By no stretch of the imagination is this adoption lan- guage. It uses birth imagery to indicate the labor pains God suffered in creating Israel in order to revive in his apostate people a sense of respon- sibility toward this deity who had been so gracious to Israel in the past. In the same way, I would argue that one should take seriously the birth im- agery used of the king in Ps 2:7, not strip it of its mythic power by trans- forming it into adoption language.

Scholars have been reluctant even to consider this possibility because of an apologetic desire to distance Israelite conceptions of the king's divine sonship as far as possible from the allegedly crudely literal Egyptian con- ceptions of the physical engenderment of the Egyptian king by the deity. In the grip of this apologetic fear, biblical scholars often speak as though birth imagery is inherently literal while the putative adoption imagery is clearly metaphorical. Simply to articulate this view is to recognize its fal- sity. Both images can be used in a literal way, but when used to speak of the deity as a parent, on any sophisticated level, both birth imagery and adoption imagery are unavoidably metaphorical. That was just as true in Egypt as it was in Judah.

* The Divine Birth of the King in the Egyptian Coronation Ritual The view that the Egyptians held a crudely literal conception of the

king's physical engenderment by the deity is based primarily on the parallel accounts of the coronation of Hatshepsut and Amenhotep III,50 and second- arily on the account of the coronation of Haremhab.51 The first two texts contain a narrative about the god Amun taking the form of the reigning king, having intercourse with the queen, filling her with "his dew," and thus engendering the new ruler. In the case of Haremhab, the text is less sexually explicit, but it does speak of his reflecting divine qualities even as a child. It is noteworthy, however, that these texts are all unusual. In all three cases the succession was contested and irregular. Thus the accounts sought to bolster shaky claims to the throne. Even in these cases, moreover, one should not overstress the literal physicality of the deity's role in the birth process.

49Ibid., 300. Tigay suggests this as a possibility for Jer 3:19; 31:8; and Hosea 11:1. 5?ARE 2. 75-100, 334. 51Ibid., 3. 12-19; Alan H. Gardiner, "The Coronation of King Haremhab," JEA 39 (1953)

13-31.

J. J. M. ROBERTS 127

In the first two texts, the narrative goes on to describe how the crafts- man god Khnum fashions the child. The texts fluctuate in referring to the mother as the divine Hathor or the human queen and in referring to the father as the divine Amun or the human king. Moreover, the Haremhab text refers to Haremhab at one moment as the son of Horus, the god of Hnes, but at another moment as the son of Amun. On any literal level, such fluctuation would be confusing. Claims as to the literal physicality of the conception of these royal figures by the gods are less important to their propaganda than the assertion that their special relationship to the divine world justifies their claim to the throne. That the language is actually more metaphorical than it appears at first also finds confirmation in the language of one of Akhenaton's hymns to the Aton:

Thy rays are upon thy beloved son. Thy hand has a myriad of jubilees for the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferkheprure-Wanre, thy child who came forth from thy rays. Thou assignest to him thy lifetime and thy years. Thou hearest for him that which is in his heart. He is thy beloved, thou makest him like Aton. When thou risest, eternity is given him; when thou settest, thou givest him everlastingness. Thou begettest him in the morning like thine own forms; thou formest him as thy emanation, like Aton, ruler of truth, who came forth from eter- nity, son of Re, wearing his beauty.....52

Here the imagery centers upon the rays of the sun rather than human in- tercourse and birth. Yet one should remember that the artistic representa- tions of Akhenaton portray him in painfully human form. One should also remember that among contemporary Egyptologists the dominant view is that the Egyptians did not regard their kings in their own person as genu- inely divine; at best the office was divine. To quote Ronald J. Leprohon:

However, the evidence shows that the living pharaoh was not, as was once thought, divine in nature or a god incarnate on earth. Rather, we should think of him as a human recipient of a divine office. Any indi- vidual king was a transitory figure, while the kingship was eternal.53

M Conclusion If, in the light of these observations, one may take the birth imagery in

the biblical text seriously and give full weight to the impressive evidence for Egyptian influence on the Judean coronation ritual, all the objections

52ARE, 2. 409. 53Ronald J. Leprohon, "Royal Ideology and State Administration in Pharaonic Egypt," in

Jack Sasson, ed., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (4 vols.; New York: Scribner's, 1995) 1. 275.

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against von Rad's basic understanding of Isa 9:5 find an answer. Amun's statement to Haremhab at his coronation, "You are my son, the heir who came forth from my flesh. .. ," is strikingly parallel to Yahweh's statement to the Davidic king in Ps 2:7, "You are my son, today I have begotten you." The Egyptian coronation ritual, however, does not only have Amun making the proclamation of the king's divine sonship directly to the new pharaoh. Amun, or Thoth speaking for him, also addresses the divine coun- cil, using third-person pronouns to present the human king to them as his son. The assembly of the gods responds to the presentation, in turn, by referring to the king in the third person. In a Judean royal ritual dependent on this Egyptian model, it would thus not be surprising to find references to the king's divine birth in both direct address to the king and in third- person announcements. There is no reason to expect such announcements to be formulated only in the active voice. Furthermore, while the Egyptian texts may identify the onset of the king's divine sonship with the physical birth of the king, the actual public announcement of that divine birth comes only at his accession and coronation, that is, at the time of the promulga- tion of the royal titulary. That a Judean adaptation of this ceremony should take the form of a traditional birth announcement and accordingly should use vocabulary referring to a young child is not at all surprising. It does not suggest a recent birth of a new royal baby any more than the parallel birth narratives in the Egyptian enthronement texts do.

Von Rad's basic understanding of Isa 8:23-9:6 does not, moreover, re- quire a change of speaker at vs. 5. He correctly saw that in the Egyptian parallels a deity was the speaker throughout, and he also noted that it would be odd for the people, speaking of the divine birth of the king, to say, "a child has been born to us." He could not, however, explain the second person references to Yahweh in vss. 2-3, if the deity was the speaker throughout. In the Egyptian texts, however, it is not just Amun who speaks; the divine council also responds to him in the second person or describes his action in the third person, praising him for his salvation. Two examples will illustrate the point. In the text of her purification ceremony, the gods announce their satisfaction with Amun's daughter Hatshepsut:

This thy daughter. . . who liveth, we are satisfied with her in life and peace. She is now thy daughter of thy form, whom thou hast begotten, prepared. Thou hast given her thy soul. .. While she was in the body of her that bore her, the lands were hers, the countries were hers; all that the heavens cover, all that the sea encircles. Thou hast now done this with her, for thou knowest the two aeons. Thou hast given to her the share of Horus in life, the years of Set in satisfaction.54

54ARE, 2. 89.

J. J. M. ROBERTS 129

Similarly, in Haremhab's coronation ritual the gods respond to the presen- tation of the new king as follows:

Behold, Amun is come, his son in front of him, to the Palace in order to establish his crown upon his head and in order to prolong his period like to himself. We have gathered together that we may establish for him [and as]sign to him the insignia of Re' and the years of Horus as king.... 55

Given these Egyptian models, one should at least consider the possibility that the fictive speakers of the entire oracle of Isa 8:23b-9:6, represented by the first-person plural pronouns in 9:5, are the members of Yahweh's divine court. Isaiah had no qualms about attributing such speech to the divine council, since he explicitly quotes the words of the seraphim in Isa 6:3, and the later Isaianic tradition continued to put important words in the mouth of members of the divine council (see Isa 40:3). In short, one may read Isa 9:5 as reflecting the joyous assent of the divine council to the new king, Yahweh's son.

55Gardiner, "Coronation of King Haremhab," 14.

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Issue Table of ContentsThe Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 115-230Front Matter [pp. 130-226]Whose Child Is This? Reflections on the Speaking Voice in Isaiah 9:5 [pp. 115-129]Staging the Gaze: Early Christian Apocalypses and Narrative Self-Representation [pp. 131-154]The Clothing of the Primordial Adam as a Symbol of Apocalyptic Time in the Midrashic Sources [pp. 155-174]Maimonides Revised: The Case of the "Sefer Miwot Gadol" [pp. 175-203]Intimations of the Finite: Thinking Pragmatically at the End of Modernity [pp. 205-223]Notes and ObservationsA Correction: On a Newly Published Divorce Bill from the Judaean Desert [p. 225]

Books Received [pp. 227-230]Back Matter