IMMANUEL
511
BIMENSITY OF GOD
I
and bear a son, and shall call liis name Tmmanuel," and in another passage of the same prophet (Isa. viii, 8), where the ravaging army of the Assyrians is described as ere long to " fill the breadth of thy land, O Imnuin- uel," i. e. Judrea, with evident allusion to the former declaration. See Aii^vz. In the name itself there is no difticidty ; but the verse, as a whole, has been vari- ously interpreted. From the manner in which the word God, and even Jehovah, is used in the composition of Hebrew names, there is no such peculiarity in that of Immanuel as in itself requires us to understand that he who bore it must be in fact God. Indeed, it is used as a proper name among the Jews at this day. This high sense has, however, been assigned to it in consequence of the application of the whole verse, by the evangelist Matthew (i, 23), to our divine Saviour. Even if this reference ilid not exist, the history of the Nativity would irresistibly lead us to the conclusion that the verse — wliatever may have been its intermediate signi- fication— had an ultimate reference to Christ. See Isai- Air. The state of opinion on this point has been thus concisely summed up by Dr. Henderson in his note on the text : " This verse has long been a subject of dis- pute between Jews and professedly Christian writers, and among the latter mutually. While the former re- ject its application to the iNIessiah altogether — the ear- lier Rabbins explaining it of the queen of Ahaz and the birth of his son Hezekiah, and the later, as Kimchi and Abarbanel, of the prophet's own wife — the great body of Christian interpreters have held it to be direct- ly and exclusively a prophecy of our Saviour, and have considered tliemselves fully borne out by the inspired testimony of the evangelist Matthew. Others, how- ever, have departed from this construction of the pas- sage, and have invented or adopted various hypotheses in support of such dissent. Grotius, Faber, Isenbiehl, Heze], Bolten, Fritzsche, Pluschke, Gesenius, and Ilit- zig, suppose either the then present or a future wife of Isaiah to be the "Tsbi*, almah [rendered 'virgin'], re- ferred to. Eichhorn, Paulus, Hensler, and Ammon are of opinion that the prophet had nothing more in view than an ideal virgin, and that both she and her son are merely imaginary personages, introduced for the pur- pose of prophetic illustration. Bauer, Cube, Steudel, and some others, think that the prophet pointed to a young woman in the presence of the king and his court- iers. A fourth class, among whom are Richard Simon, Lowth, Koppe, Dathe, Williams, Von Meyer, Olshausen, and Dr. J. Pye Smith, admit the hypothesis of a double sense (q. v.) : one, in which the words apply primarily to some female living in the time of the prophet, and her giving birth to a son according to the ordinary laws of nature ; or, as Dathe holds, to some virgin, who at that time sliould miraculously conceive ; and the other, in which they received a secondary and plenary fulfil- ment in the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus Christ." (See tlie monographs enumerated by Volbe- ding, Index, p. 14 ; and Fiirst, Bib. Jud. ii, 60 ; also Heng- stenberg, Cliristol. des A. T. ii, 69, and the commenta- tors in general ; compare the Stud. u. Krit. 1830, iii, 538.) This last seems to us the only consistent interpretation. That the child to be so designated was one soon to be born and already spoken of is clear from the entire con- text and drift of the prophecy. It can be no other than the Maher-shalal-hash-baz (q. v.), the offspring of the prophet's own marriage with the virgin prophetess, who thus became an eminent type of the Messiah's mother (Isa. viii, 18). See Virgin.
Immanuel, ben-Salojion Romi, a Jewish philos- opher, commentator, and poet, was born at Rome about 1265. Endowed with great natural ability, and with a fondness for study, he soon made himself master of Bib- lical and Talmudic, as well as of Grecian and Latin lit- erature. He was a contemporary of Dante, and, being much given to a cultivation of the same art in which Dante immortalized his name, " the two spirits, kindred, and yet different in many respects, formed a mutual and
intimate attachment." He died about 1330. Imman- uel wrote commentaries on the whole Jewish Bible, ex- cepting the minor prophets and Ezra. They are en- riched not only by valuable grammatical and archaeo- logical notes, but contain also some able remarks on the nature and spirit of the poetical books. '• It is greatly to be regretted that of all his exegetical works, which are in different public libraries of Europe, the Com- mantary on Provei-hs and Some Glosses on the Psalms are the only ones as yet published, the former in Naples in 1486, and tlie latter in Parma in 1806. The introduc- tion of his commentary on the Song of Songs has been published, with an English translation, by Ginsburg : Historical and Critical Commentary on the Song of Songs (Lond. 1857, p. 49-55)" (Ginsburg in Kitto). He wrote also some philosophical treatises, and translated for his Jewish brethren the philosophical writings of Albertus the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and other cele- brated philosophers. See Griitz, Gesch. der Juden. vii, 307 sq.; Geiger, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, 1839, iv. 194 sq. ; Fiirst, Bihlioth. Jud. ii, 92 sq. (J. H. W.)