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The original form of this article was addressed to Tovia Singer. Since then, I have been charged with error on a point within, but in trying to investigate discovered that Singer's article is no longer online and that a nearly identical version is online by Uri Yosef. Since no one seems to be able to explain this, I am neither admitting to error nor saying I did not make one, because I am not convinced that Yosef's article duplicates Singer's. Instead I will simply rewrite this article addressed to Yosef's version as it appears in December 2006.

Given the season I decided to seek out new life and new civilizations and address someone's anti-Christmas canard somewhere. Not that I stump for a 12/25 birthdate for Jesus at all, but it seemed appropos.

What we have here is Uri "Not the Jesus Scholar" Yosef, entitled Bethlehem: The Messiah's Birthplace. It doesn't hold a candle to Miller's detailed work here, and actually does get thoroughly beat by it (with a supplemental beating delivered by the material found here), especially on the issue of whether "Bethlehem" is a clan or a city (here's a hint: by the rules of midrash, and the ancient perception of "probabilities," and the intimate identification of said clan with their ancestral city, it doesn't make any difference if Micah meant the clan and not the city), but there are a couple of points Yosef makes an issue of that are worth highlighting and that Glenn's item does not cover.

Yosef goes off his gourd complaining about what the KJV does (never mind what Biblical scholars do, since he consults none, and barely tips a hat to other translations) in making Micah 5 translated differently than the same Hebrew word is translated elsewhere. The critical issue of course is what exactly the Hebrew word does support, and in that regard, the word in question, 'olam, is one we have seen before -- as noted from James Barr's Biblical Words for Time, this is a word that means "in perpetuity" -- Hebrew having, as Barr notes, no actual word for "eternity". As we noted in other places:

The word olam is also used to describe the tenure of a slave, indicating that his service will last for the entirety of his life. One might argue that this indicates a time that ends, but the parallel usage of olam with the phrase "as long as he lives" in 1 Sam. 1:22-28 indicates that what lies behind olam in these cases is something of a figurative sense of "forever" that stresses the permanence of the person's condition.

What this means is that 'olam can only mean "forver" if the context says so (eg, if it referred to God). And Jewish thought contemporary with early Christianity does allow for the idea that the Messiah was eternal. So one can hardly disqualify a midrashic application of this passage to Jesus on the basis of the use of 'olam. Far from being "disastrous to Christian theology" as Yosef claims, it nestles quite comfortably with it.

Other than this, Yosef claims that the "Messiah cannot be born in the insignificant place that is the lowest on the totem pole," buy why this is so, he fails to explain. One may as well argue that Moses could not have been born in pagan Egypt. In the end, however, Yosef has to admit, "this prophecy speaks of Bethlehem as the Messiah's place of origin, though not necessarily his place of birth." (!) Not necessarily! So then what's the point of Yosef's complaining? Finally Yosef asks the rather silly question, "Using the logic of the Christian claim, and considering the many thousands of people having come from Bethlehem during its history, how is it possible to identify which one of them was the Messiah?" Let's not pretend, shall we, that this argument is the only one in the arsenal?

Merry Chr -- um, Happy Hanukkah, Uri!