Harvard Divinity School

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

Author(s): J. J. M. Roberts
Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 115-129
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School
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Whose ChildIs This?

Reflectionson the Speaking
Voice in Isaiah9:5*
J. J. M. Roberts
Princeton Theological Seminary

n his 1947 article, "Das judaische Konigsritual," Gerhard von Rad argued that the Judean enthronement ritual was heavily dependent on the
corresponding Egyptian ritual.1He 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 appeared 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

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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

* ContemporaryCritiqueof 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, however, 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.
4AlbrechtAlt, "Jesaja8, 23-9, 6. Befreiungsmachtund 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 language, 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 arguments against the adoptionist-coronation interpretation of the Isaiah passage.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. Carlson12and, 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 assertion 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-Examination 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.14Then 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 ("wonderful 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 inscriptions 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,"18but 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.

* Adoptionand AdoptionFormulae
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. Nonetheless, 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.
19ShalomM. Paul, "Adoption Formulae: A Study of Cuneiform and Biblical Legal Clauses,"
Maarav 2/2 (1979-80) 173-85.

J. J. M. ROBERTS

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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,"21and as Tigay observes, "the very institution of
adoption was rare-if at all existent-in Israel."22One 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 dissolution 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 connectionwith the dissolution (of an adoptive relationship)
originally specific formal expressionswill have been used. If this is
correct,however,it allows one to supposethat also in connectionwith
the entranceinto the adoptiverelationshipscorrespondingphraseshave
found employment;in otherwords,thatthe adoptioncontractpossibly
has been connectedoriginallywith the saying of solemn declarations.
In connectionwith a giving into adoptionthis may have been something like: "Youare his father,you are my child;"when an Arrogation
(adoptionof 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.
23MartinDavid, 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 I170:37-59:
If a man'swife bore him childrenand 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 havingcountedthemwith the childrenof the first wife, after
the fatherhas gone to (his) fate, the childrenof the first wife and the
childrenof the slave shall shareequally in the goods of the paternal
estate, with the firstborn,the son of the first wife, receivinga preferential 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 legitimation.
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 formulathough 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'sadaptation of Theophile J. Meeks translation in ANET (3d ed.; 1969) 173.

26ArthurB. Ungnad, Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin (Leipzig: Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1909) 6, nos. 10-11.
27Ibid., no. 10.10-11, no. 11.8-9.

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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 appropriatesuccessor. 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."30Later 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]."31While 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. "Today" 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 contract. 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 adoption 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.
29FerdinandSommer and Adam Falkenstein, Die Hethitisch-AkkadischeBilingue des Hattusili
I. (Labarna II.) (Abhandlungen der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, PhilosophischHistorische Abteilung, n.s. 16; Munich: Verlag der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
1938).
30a-nu-um-maTUR-am la-ba-ar-na [aq-bji-a-ak-ku-nu-si-im su-u li-it-ta-sa-ab-mi LUGALru [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

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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 metaphorical 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 relationship 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' (=dynasty), 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 adoption."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 YarimLim, 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."37This 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.

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argued, Abba-El of Aleppo (Haleb) and Yarim-Lim of Alalah were probably 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 AbbaEl 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 learnedfrom the treaty between SuppiluliumaSand Mattiwaza.39Mattiwaza,in describinghow
he establishedrelations with Suppiluliumas,says: "(The great king)
graspedme with [his ha]nd. .. and said: when I will conquerthe land
of MitanniI shall not rejectyou, I shall makeyou my son, I will stand
by (to help in war) and will make you sit on the throneof your father. .. the wordwhich comes out of his mouthwill not turnback."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'sdisastrous war against guppiluliumag, TuSrattawas 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, "FurtherObservations 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 Vorderorient (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,42but 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 causedhim to sit on the throneof his father.In orderthat the
land of Mitanni,the greatland, not perish,I the greatking, the king of
the land of Hatti, revived the land of Mitanni for the sake of my
daughter.Mattiwaza,the son of Tusratta,I graspedin my hand,and I
gave to him (my) daughteras his wife. And Mattiwaza,the son of the
king, shall surely be king in the land of Mitanni,and the daughterof
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 adoption, did not bolster his legal claim to the throne of Mitanni. In real adoption 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 expressions 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
41ErnstF. 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).

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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 described 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 playing 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 metaphor 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:"Israelis my first born
son, and I said to you, 'Send my son that he may serve me.' But you
refusedto send him. Now thereforeI am aboutto 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 indication 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 language 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 language. 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 responsibility 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 imagery used of the king in Ps 2:7, not strip it of its mythic power by transforming 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 conceptions 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 falsity. 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.

Ritual
* TheDivineBirthof the Kingin theEgyptianCoronation
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,50and secondarily on the account of the coronation of Haremhab.51The 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?ARE2. 75-100, 334.
51Ibid., 3. 12-19; Alan H. Gardiner, "The Coronation of King Haremhab," JEA 39 (1953)
13-31.

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In the first two texts, the narrative goes on to describe how the craftsman 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 handhas a myriadof jubilees
for the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferkheprure-Wanre,
thy
child who came forthfrom thy rays.Thouassignestto him thy lifetime
and thy years. Thou hearestfor him that which is in his heart.He is
thy beloved, thou makesthim like Aton. When thou risest, eternityis
given him; when thou settest, thou givest him everlastingness.Thou
begettesthim in the morninglike thine own forms;thou formesthim
as thy emanation,like Aton, rulerof truth,who came forth from eternity, son of Re, wearinghis beauty.....52
Here the imagery centers upon the rays of the sun rather than human intercourse and birth. Yet one should remember that the artistic representations 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 genuinely divine; at best the office was divine. To quote Ronald J. Leprohon:
However,the evidence shows that the living pharaohwas not, as was
once thought,divine in natureor a god incarnateon earth.Rather,we
shouldthinkof him as a humanrecipientof a divine office. Any individualking was a transitoryfigure,while the kingshipwas 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 council, 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 thirdperson 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 promulgation 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, require 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 satisfiedwith her in life and
peace. She is now thy daughterof thy form, whomthou 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 countrieswere hers; all
that the heavenscover, all that the sea encircles.Thou hast now done
this with her, for thou knowestthe two aeons. Thou hast given to her
the shareof Horusin life, the yearsof Set in satisfaction.54
54ARE,2. 89.

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Similarly, in Haremhab's coronation ritual the gods respond to the presentation of the new king as follows:
Behold, Amunis come, his son in frontof him, to the Palace in order
to establishhis crownuponhis head and in orderto prolonghis period
like to himself. We have gatheredtogetherthat we may establishfor
him [and as]sign to him the insigniaof Re' and the years of Horusas
55
king....
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.