Isaiah 9:6
Mighty God, or Mighty Hezekiah?

Objection 1 · The Verbs Are Past Tense

"A child has been born," "a son has been given" — Singer notes the verbs are grammatically past, describing someone already born in Isaiah's own time, not a future prophecy Christian translations quietly shifted into the future tense.

Weight: The verb forms are indeed perfect tense, but this is not decisive on its own. Biblical Hebrew regularly uses the "prophetic perfect" — describing a still-future event in the grammatical past tense to express its certainty, as though already accomplished in the prophet's vision. This is not special pleading invented for this verse: Isaiah 53, addressed in Exhibit C, uses the same device throughout a passage whose subject had not yet appeared even on the fully human reading. Past-tense grammar in Hebrew prophecy is a stylistic marker of certainty, not proof the event already occurred.

Objection 2 · Hezekiah's Name Already Means "Mighty God"

Singer states there is only one person in the Bible called "the mighty God" — Hezekiah — implying the king's own name carries this meaning and the title in Isaiah 9 simply describes him by it.

Weight: This is a checkable factual error, not an interpretive judgment call. Hezekiah's name, חִזְקִיָּהוּ (Chizkiyahu), is built from חזק ("to strengthen") plus the theophoric short form of YHWH — it means "Yahweh strengthens" or "my strength is Yah," the same construction pattern as Hallelu-Yah. It is a completely different word, and a completely different grammatical construction, from אֵל גִּבּוֹר (El Gibbor). The two phrases are not linguistically related, and no lexicon treats them as equivalent.

Objection 3 · The Titles Belong to God, Not the Child

Rashi, following Targum Jonathan's rendering, reads the sentence with God as the subject doing the naming and describing Himself — "The Holy One, blessed be He, who gives wondrous counsel, is a mighty God and an everlasting Father, called Hezekiah's name 'the prince of peace.'" On this reading, only שַׂר־שָׁלוֹם ("prince of peace") is actually Hezekiah's name; the other titles describe the One doing the naming.

Weight: This is a real, respected reading, and it should be credited to Rashi rather than dismissed. But two things weigh against it. First, it is a minority strategy even within classical sources: the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 94a), centuries earlier than Rashi, states plainly that "the eight names of Hezekiah" include Pele, Yoetz, El Gibbor, Avi-Ad, and Sar Shalom together — treating all the titles as names of the child, not as a description of God doing the naming. The Talmud felt no need for Rashi's grammatical move. Second, the same literary unit already establishes the opposite pattern twice: in Isaiah 7:14 and 8:3, it is the newborn child who receives the significant name, not God. Rashi's reading breaks a pattern the same prophet had just used twice in the surrounding chapters.

Objection 4 · Gibbor Can Simply Mean "Mighty Warrior"

גִּבּוֹר (gibbor) by itself frequently describes human warriors and heroes throughout the Tanakh — so אֵל גִּבּוֹר could plausibly mean something like "divine warrior" or "mighty hero," a title of martial praise rather than a claim of deity, especially given the war-victory imagery earlier in the same chapter (9:2–4).

Weight: Gibbor alone does carry that broader range. But אֵל גִּבּוֹר is a different, fixed construction, and it is not ambiguous elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 10:17 uses it of God ("the great, the mighty, and the awesome El"); Jeremiah 32:18 uses it of God ("the great, the mighty El, YHWH of hosts is his name"). Most decisively, the identical phrase recurs two chapters later, Isaiah 10:21, from the same prophet in the same book, referring to God without any dispute: "a remnant will return... to the mighty God." Isaiah uses this exact two-word phrase for God himself a few verses after using it in 9:6. That is a high bar for reading it as a merely human warrior-title in the earlier occurrence.

Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 9:5–6

"His name is called from eternity, Wonderful, The Mighty God, who liveth to eternity, The Messiah, whose peace shall be great upon us in His days." (trans. C. W. H. Pauli)

This is the same Targum already featured in Exhibit C reading Isaiah 52:13 as messianic. Here too, and independent of any Christian argument, it applies eternal, exalted language — "who liveth to eternity" — directly to a figure it names explicitly as the Messiah. Whatever grammatical strategy later interpreters used to soften the titles, the earliest rabbinic translation tradition available did not shy from pairing "the Mighty God" with "the Messiah" in the same verse.