1. In my reading today of Messianism Within the Scriptural Scrolls of Isaiah, Randall Heskett refers to John Calvin’s argument that the son who is born in Isaiah 7 and 9 could not be Hezekiah, as some Jewish interpreters were claiming, for Hezekiah was born long before the historical setting of Isaiah 7 and 9, namely, the Syro-Ephraimite alliance’s conspiracy to attack Judah.
I checked out II Kings 15-18 to see if this was so. I’m not sure if I’m correct, since the years in these chapters don’t always add up (see my post on II Kings 15), and many have suggested that we can make the numbers add up by appealing to coregencies, in which a king was alive, but his son ruled. I didn’t take that into consideration in my calculations, since it’s been a long day, and I’m tired. What I calculated, though, was that Hezekiah was 12-15 years old during the seventeenth-twentieth years of Pekah. Remember that Pekah was the Israelite king of the Syro-Ephraimite alliance, and that Ahaz (the king during the events of Isaiah 7-9) ascended the throne of Judah in the seventeenth year of Pekah. So, if the coregency factor makes no difference, then Calvin is right: Hezekiah was born long before the Syro-Ephraimite alliance of Isaiah 7-9.
2. In my reading today of Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Jacob Neusner talked about rabbinic attempts to hold off the chaos of impurity. That was interesting, because the professor I was meeting with this morning once told a story about two professors who gave a presentation at a scholarly conference on the biblical purity system: one was messy, whereas the other was neat. They discussed their attempts to regulate impurity, and compared that to the purity system of Leviticus.
3. So the Vanessa Williams character on Desperate Housewives is moving into Eedie’s old house. Lynette noted the irony! Vanessa Williams seems like she might be an Eedie type of character: going after other women’s men, even as she shames those women into treating their men right. Eedie did this with Gabby, and with Bree. Is Marc Cherry telling us that Eedie is indispensable: that if she’s dead, there must be another like her? This is how some see God: if he doesn’t exist, then someone must invent him! Or is Marc saying that Eedie is dispensable, meaning that somebody else can fill her shoes—which could be his response to Nicolette Sheridan’s lawsuit against him?