{"id":67418,"date":"2019-12-22T12:15:54","date_gmt":"2019-12-22T10:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=67418"},"modified":"2023-07-16T12:00:31","modified_gmt":"2023-07-16T09:00:31","slug":"who-was-the-first-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/who-was-the-first-father\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Was the \u201cFirst Father\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our chapter closes with \u201cYour earliest ancestor (literally: your first father) sinned, and your spokesmen transgressed against Me. So I profaned the holy princes; I abandoned Jacob to proscription and Israel to mockery\u201d (27-28). The exegetes differed sharply on his identification.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rashi identified him with the actual first father, Abraham, citing his challenge to God \u201cHow shall I know that I will inherit [the land]?\u201d (Gen. 15:8). Eliezer of Beaugency, a later French exegete, assigned the name to the entire generation of the Exodus from Egypt, who were God\u2019s first chosen people. Ibn Ezra said it refers to Jeroboam, the first king of Israel, whose selection was not initiated by God. And Radak referred it to everyone\u2019s first father, Adam.<\/span><\/p>\n

Malbim*, like Eliezer of Beaugency, saw it as a collective designation rather than an individual one, but he assigned it to a different generation.<\/span><\/p>\n

They are your earliest ancestors, the generations during the time of the Temple, who sinned against Me, and your \u201cspokesmen\u201d are the priests and prophets who \u201ctransgressed against me\u201d deliberately. Everything they did was premeditated, as opposed to the general population whose deliberate misdeeds were regarded as accidental.<\/span><\/p>\n

He continued by explaining that the two halves of the verses parallel each other.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because the \u201cspokesmen transgressed,\u201d God \u201cprofaned them\u201d [the priests and prophets] and because the earlier \u201cancestors sinned,\u201d He \u201cabandoned Jacob\u201d by abandoning the entire nation \u201cto proscription\u201d and desolation. And \u201cIsrael,\u201d which refers to its sanctity and its saints and great men, was \u201cmade a mockery\u201d because they mocked their Torah and their sanctity.<\/span><\/p>\n

This sequencing displays a degree of literary sophistication. Rather than establishing the relationship between the elements of the two verses in an ordinary sequential fashion (which would match the \u201cfirst father\u201d with the \u201choly princes,\u201d and the \u201cspokesmen\u201d with Jacob and Israel), Malbim saw the relationship as chiastic, matching the first ingredient with the last and the innermost two with one another.<\/span><\/p>\n

*For the significance of Malbim\u2019s commentary to the Book of Isaiah,<\/span> see our introduction to chapter 1.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":67419,"id":67419,"title":"is43-father","filename":"is43-father.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is43-father.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/who-was-the-first-father\/is43-father\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"is43-father","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":67418,"date":"2019-12-22 10:15:38","modified":"2019-12-22 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