Jesus and Joshua.

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by MrMacSon »

.
I'm intrigued with how early some of these are
Ben C. Smith wrote:
  • < . . snip . . >
I will usually render the name Joshua as Jesus, just so that the modern ear can hear what the ancient ear heard (since I think we tend to file Joshua and Jesus away in two different categories sometimes).

The name Jesus/Joshua comes from the Hebrew Yehoshua, shortened to Yeshua. Yehoshua, a theophoric name, means something like "Yahweh saves" (or "Yahweh is salvation"). Philo seems aware of this etymology:

Philo, On the Change of Names 21.121-122: 121 Thus much we have thought fit to say on this subject. But, moreover, Moses also changes the name of Hosea into that of Jesus; displaying by his new name the distinctive qualities of his character; 122 for the name Hosea is interpreted, "what sort of a person is this?" but Jesus means "the salvation of the Lord" [Ἰησοῦς δὲ σωτηρία κυρίου], being the name of the most excellent possible character [ἕξεως ὄνομα τῆς ἀριστης]; for the habits are better with respect to those persons who are of such and such qualities from being influenced by them: as, for instance, music is better in a musician, physic in a physician, and each art of a distinctive quality in each artist, regarded both in its perpetuity, and in its power, and in its unerring perfection with regard to the objects of its speculation. For a habit is something everlasting, energising, and perfect; but a man of such and such a quality is mortal, the object of action, and imperfect. And what is imperishable is superior to what is mortal, the efficient cause is better than that which is the object of action; and what is perfect is preferable to what is imperfect. ...< . . snip . . >

The Jesus Hymn in Philippians 2 seems to utilize this etymology, since the "name above every name" ought to be Yahweh (the tetragrammaton), yet it comes out as Jesus: ...

Matthew, too, is aware of the meaning ...

As is Sirach:

Wisdom of Sirach 46.1-7: 1 Jesus [Ἰησοῦς] the son of Nave was valiant in the wars, and was the successor of Moses in prophecies, who according to his name was made great for the saving [ἐπὶ σωτηρίᾳ] of the elect of God, and taking vengeance of the enemies that rose up against them, that he might set Israel in their inheritance. 2 How great glory gat he, when he did lift up his hands, and stretched out his sword against the cities! 3 Who before him so stood to it? for the Lord himself brought his enemies unto him. 4 Did not the sun go back by his means? And was not one day as long as two? 5 He called upon the most high Lord, when the enemies pressed upon him on every side; and the great Lord heard him. 6 And with hailstones of mighty power he made the battle to fall violently upon the nations, and in the descent of Beth-horon he destroyed them that resisted, that the nations might know all their strength, because he fought in the sight of the Lord, and he followed the Mighty One. 7 In the time of Moses also he did a work of mercy, he and Caleb the son of Jephunne, in that they withstood the congregation, and withheld the people from sin, and appeased the wicked murmuring. 8 And of six hundred thousand people on foot, they two were preserved to bring them in to the heritage, even unto the land that floweth with milk and honey.

Sirach mentions in verse 4 the episode in which the sun stands still:

Joshua 10.12-14: 12 Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, “O sun, stand still at Gibeon, / and O moon in the valley of Aijalon.” / 13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, / until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies. Is it not written in the book of Jashar? And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. 14 There was no day like that before it or after it, when the Lord listened to the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel.

The Sibylline Oracles appear to refer to this episode and assimilate both Jesus and Joshua somehow:

Sibylline Oracles 5.255-258: Then there shall come from the sky a certain / exalted man whose hands he spread out upon the fruitful tree, / The noblest of the Hebrews who caused the sun to stand still [Ἑβραίων ὁ ἄριστος, ὃς ἡέλιόν ποτε στῆσε] / When he cries with fair speech and pure lips.

This passage uses the same word here for "noblest" as Philo did while commending Joshua for his "most excellent" character.

It is interesting to me that the book of Joshua begins with the commission of Joshua (after Moses' death) and ends with Joshua's death; likewise, our extant gospel of Mark begins with the commission of Jesus (at his baptism) and ends with Jesus' death and resurrection.

The book of Deuteronomy promises the coming of what we have come to call "a prophet like Moses" in Moses' farewell speech:

Deuteronomy 18.15-22: 15 “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him. 16 This is according to all that you asked of the Lord your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.’ 17 The Lord said to me, ‘They have spoken well. 18 I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. 19 It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him. 20 But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ 21 You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’ 22 When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.”

Was Joshua that prophet? Not according to the last passage in the book:

Deuteronomy 34.9-12: 9 Now Jesus the son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him; and the sons of Israel listened to him and did as the Lord had commanded Moses. 10 Since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, 11 for all the signs and wonders which the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt against Pharaoh, all his servants, and all his land, 12 and for all the mighty power and for all the great terror which Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.

  • < . . snip . . >
Deuteronomy and Joshua are ~500-200 BC/BCE; Wisdom of Sirach is ~220-175 BC/BCE; and the Sibylline Oracles are ~180-140 BC/BCE.

Exodus, Ezra, and Zechariah are, of course, older than the 400 BC/BCE. too.
outhouse
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by outhouse »

Ben C. Smith wrote: For example, going from Yeshua straight to Jesus would mean that somebody took a Hebrew name and turned the yod into a J in the way one Anglicizes Hebrew words while simultaneously adding, for no apparent reason, a Latin case ending (-us). Why would someone do that when going straight from Hebrew to English? No, the Latin case ending obviously got there when it rendered the Greek ending (-οῦς).

It went Aramaic - Koine for the Etymology

How much Hebrew influence went into the Koine authors should be very limited knowing these were products of the Diaspora. I wouldn't rule it out completely but we were not dealing with taking a Hebrew name and changing it. Hell the Aramaic transliterations are limited.

Had the text developed in Israel, you might have a better case going down this road your searching. I think as Peter states it needs to be done it is a good topic, and I wish you luck
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by Ben C. Smith »

outhouse wrote:
Ben C. Smith wrote: For example, going from Yeshua straight to Jesus would mean that somebody took a Hebrew name and turned the yod into a J in the way one Anglicizes Hebrew words while simultaneously adding, for no apparent reason, a Latin case ending (-us). Why would someone do that when going straight from Hebrew to English? No, the Latin case ending obviously got there when it rendered the Greek ending (-οῦς).
It went Aramaic - Koine for the Etymology
Where is this documented? Which Greek texts render an Aramaic version of the name before the LXX renders the Hebrew of the Pentateuch?
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Secret Alias
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by Secret Alias »

The identification of Joshua as the Ta'eb must have come from a group that preserved the Tetrateuch.
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Secret Alias
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by Secret Alias »

The Samaritan text Tibat Marqe - even though it is preserved in Aramaic - preserves a numerological association (gematria) with the two opening words of the Song of the Sea IN GREEK 'Then sang' (Ex 15.1). These words, it notes, have a numerological value of 888 as does Jesus in Greek. Given the context is clearly 'messianic' (for lack of a better word) there may have been significance in this. Also it is worth noting that in the Samaritan Pentateuch 'Joshua' is always 'Joshua' (i.e. his name is never rendered as 'Hosea' it is never transformed with the addition of a 'he').

τότε ᾖσεν Μωυσῆς καὶ οἱ υἱοὶ Ισραηλ τὴν ᾠδὴν ταύτην τῷ θεῷ καὶ εἶπαν λέγοντες ᾄσωμεν τῷ κυρίῳ ἐνδόξως γὰρ δεδόξασται ἵππον καὶ ἀναβάτην ἔρριψεν εἰς θάλασσαν

τότε ᾖσεν = 888

Also FWIW משה = 345 and אהיה אשר אהיה = 543 which = 888.
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Steven Avery
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by Steven Avery »

Ben C. Smith wrote:The name Jesus/Joshua comes from the Hebrew Yehoshua, shortened to Yeshua. Yehoshua, a theophoric name, means something like "Yahweh saves" (or "Yahweh is salvation").
The connection quite clearly actually works as Yehovah saves (or "Yehovah is salvation"). And simply does not work with the corruption "Yahweh."

And Yehovah (or Jehovah) is the correct vocalization of the Tetragram. The yahwehistas were so upset and perturbed with this that they proposed changing the name of Jesus to Yahshua. This blunder only began in the Sacred Name movement of the 1930s.

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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by Secret Alias »

And Yehovah (or Jehovah) is the correct vocalization of the Tetragram.
Nonsense. Not even worth a response.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
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Steven Avery
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by Steven Avery »

Secret Alias wrote:
And Yehovah (or Jehovah) is the correct vocalization of the Tetragram.
Nonsense. Not even worth a response.

Then I will help you to learn more excellently.

The karaite Nehemia Gordon has been working with the Hebraics and with the Masoretic text mss. He is quite solid on Hebraic issues, having copublished with Emaneul Tov in the DJD, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. He actually has been teaching the proper expression of the Tetragram since at least 2000, when I was at his teaching in Talpiot, Jerusalem. (No endorsement of his NT views here.) I remember which year because I was in Israel during the subway series.

Similar and corroborating material is available from others, two of my favorites are the material from Carl Franklin and Gerard Gertoux.

Certain aspects, like the theophoric names above, are so rock-solid that it is actually very easy to unravel the yahweh confusions.

One of the specialties of Nehemia is to show how the Masoretic Text manuscripts have the remnants of the proper three-vowel forms, even with the various masking attempts for the readers. And he showed how Gesenius actually moved to "yahweh" because it was so akin to the sound of the pagan Jove (Jupiter being jove-pater.)

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John2
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by John2 »

I've been a big fan of Gordon's since I met him on a discussion group about twenty years ago and he is one of the smartest people I've ever talked with. At the time I was considering becoming a Karaite but my interest in Judaism was starting to wane by then, but Gordon still makes me think there could be something to the OT after all (almost but not quite) and I still respect the Karaite approach to interpretation.

The pronunciation of YHWH seems too complicated to me to get off the fence, but here is a link to Gordon's argument.
But what of the vowels? Are they really the vowels of Adonai?

To understand this problem we must consider an ancient Hebrew scribal practice called Kere-Qetiv, “the read (Qere) and the written (Ketiv)” ... Qere-Ketiv occurs when a certain word is written in Scripture one way (Ketiv), but a note in the margin of the biblical text indicates that it is to be read as if it were written another way (Qere). Apparently, many of the Qere-Ketivs were formed when the Temple scribes compared two or three ancient manuscripts of Scripture. The scribes found slight differences between the manuscripts and left one form of the word in the body of Scripture while the other they recorded in the margin. The significance of Qere-Ketiv for the question of the divine name is that the Ketiv, the form written in the body of Scripture, is always written with the vowels of the Qere, the way the word is read. The argument concerning the name is that YHVH has the consonants of the name but the vowels of Adonai and this is presented as fact in every introduction to Biblical Hebrew and every scholarly discussion of the name. There are two problems with this scholarly consensus. The first is that in all the other instances of Qere-Ketiv, the word which is read differently than the way it is written is marked by a circle in the biblical manuscripts. The circle refers the reader to a marginal note that says “read it such and such”. So in the instance of the name we would expect there to be a circle over the word YHVH with a marginal note instructing us “read it Adonai” But no such note exists! YHVH appears 6828 times in the Hebrew text of Scripture but it is never identified as a Qere-Ketiv by either a scribal circle or a marginal note. The second problem with the claim that YHVH has the vowels of Adonai is quite simply that it does not! The vowels of Adonai are A-O-A (hataf patach – cholam – kamats). In contrast, the name YHVH is written with the vowels e—A (sheva – no vowel -kamats). The vowels of YHVH are clearly different from the vowels of Adonai! YHVH is written YeHVaH but with the vowels of Adonai it should have been Yahovah! How is it that the scholarly consensus missed this factual evidence? Up until recently printers of the text of Scripture have freely modified the name YHVH. In many printings of the Hebrew Scriptures YHVH is written with no vowels at all while in other printings it is in fact written as Yahovah with the vowels of Adonai. However, when we check the earliest complete manuscripts of Scripture we find that YHVH is written YeHVaH. This is how YHVH is written in the Ben Asher manuscripts (Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex b) which preserve the most accurate complete text of Scripture. In these photographs it is clear that the name YHVH is written repeatedly as YeHVaH and not with the vowels of Adonai as YaHoVaH.

https://www.slideshare.net/davehome/yeh ... ounciation


And there are some interesting questions about this idea here (which also has the above link and others): http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-he ... 50040.html
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John2
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Re: Jesus and Joshua.

Post by John2 »

I think 4Q175 could be relevant to this discussion. As I noted in another thread, 4Q175 is a collection of arguably messianic proof texts (two of which are applied to Jesus in later Christian writings), which include the prophet like Moses (Dt. 18:18-19), the Star Prophecy (Num. 24:15-17), a reference to the Levites (Dt. 33:8-11) and a reference to Joshua. As Vermes puts it, "The first group consists of two texts from Deuteronomy referring to the prophet similar to Moses; the second is an extract from a prophecy of Balaam about the Royal Messiah; the third is a blessing of the Levites, and, implicitly, the Priest-Messiah. The last group opens with a verse from Joshua."

So several arguably messianic elements are gathered here (whether they are applicable to one person or not), and the inclusion of a verse from Joshua (6:26) is interesting because not only does it connect him to these arguably messianic texts, it changes the original context of Jos. 6:26 from Jericho to Jerusalem.

So the elements of being a prophet/messiah figure and like Joshua are in 4Q175, and in the case of the Egyptian in Josephus, it is curious that he wanted to make the walls of Jerusalem fall down, since 4Q175 says, "they have rebuilt [this city and have set up for it] a wall and towers to make of it a stronghold of ungodliness in Israel" (and again the context of this is Jerusalem instead of Jericho).
You know in spite of all you gained, you still have to stand out in the pouring rain.
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