Rejected - Tumblr Posts
Ikaw na nga ung nag iisang choice hindi ka pa pinipili.
Finally worked up the courage to watch season 2 of Good Omens and I sincerely regret it. I feel like my heart has been carved out of my chest and stomped on while a crowd yells at me that I'm an idiot. It could be YEARS before there's a season 3 that fixes things, I can't handle that
How could you do this Neil Gaiman????? When I trusted you??????
Isaiah 53: Why God’s Suffering Servant is Not Israel
By Author Eli Kittim
——-
The Bible sometimes uses metaphorical language that often involves multiple layers of meaning. Here’s a case in point. Isaiah 49.3 does mention the suffering servant as “Israel.” But four verses later the servant begins to take on unique individual qualities and characteristics that decidedly distinguish him from the earlier collective qualities of the nation of Israel. In fact, he is later contrasted with the nations, described with a masculine pronoun as an individual person who is “deeply despised” and rejected. Isa. 49.7 reads as follows:
Thus says the Lord, the
Redeemer of Israel and
his Holy One, to one
deeply despised,
abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers, ‘Kings
shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall
prostrate themselves,
because of the Lord, who
is faithful, the Holy One
of Israel, who has chosen
you.’ [1]
This rejection is given more full treatment in chapter 53. So, the question arises: How can he be both a human being and the nation of *Israel* at the same time? Answer: He cannot!
In other words, as these chapters begin to unfold, the image of the *suffering servant* evolves considerably, so much so that he’s later described with a masculine personal pronoun and depicted as an individual *man,* indeed a male: “He” (Hb. הוּא hu, which is the equivalent of the Greek αὐτὸς).[2] Therefore, it behooves us to read the Isaian passage (53.3-8) in its entirety:
He was despised and rejected by others; a
man of suffering and acquainted with
infirmity; and as one from whom others hide
their faces he was despised, and we held
him of no account. Surely he has borne our
infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we
accounted him stricken, struck down by
God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for
our transgressions, crushed for our
iniquities; upon him was the punishment
that made us whole, and by his bruises we
are healed. All we like sheep have gone
astray; we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of
us all. He was oppressed, and he was
afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like
a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like
a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so
he did not open his mouth. By a perversion
of justice he was taken away. Who could
have imagined his future? For he was cut
off from the land of the living, stricken for
the transgression of my people.
Does this sound like a characterization of a nation, let alone that of Israel? On the contrary, the suffering servant is described in the third-person singular with the masculine personal pronoun “he,” in the sense that it is he who “is led to the slaughter” (Isa. 53.7), not the nation of Israel! He is also described as “a man.” The third-person masculine pronoun “he” is then reiterated in v. 8 in order to establish not only the male identity of the suffering servant but also his personal demise:
For he was cut off from the land of the living
[slain], stricken for the transgression of my
people.
In this particular context, it cannot be a nation that is “cut off from the land of the living . . . for the transgression of” the people. That would strain the contextual meaning to give it a rather absurd interpretation. This is Atonement language regarding a specific man who is slain, and who dies as a sin offering! Isaiah 53.5 adds that his punishment “made us whole,” and “by his bruises we are healed”:
He was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the
punishment that made us whole, and by his
bruises we are healed.
We would normally expect to find this type of language——describing an explicit sacrifice as an atonement for sin——in the New Testament, not in the Hebrew Bible. For the aforementioned reasons, this passage does not square well with the so-called “nation of Israel” philological exegesis. This Hebraic insistence on the nation of Israel is therefore utterly disingenuous and dishonest!
——-
Past Tenses Do Not Imply Past Actions
——-
Insofar as the New Testament is concerned, verbal aspect theory, which is at the cutting edge of Hellenistic Greek linguistics, demonstrates that tense-forms do not have any temporal implications. According to Stanley E Porter, a leading authority on New Testament linguistics, past tenses are not necessarily references to past history:
Temporal values (past, present, future) are
not established in Greek by use of the
verbal aspects (or tense-forms) alone. This
may come as a surprise to those who, like
most students of Greek, were taught at an
elementary level that certain tense-forms
automatically refer to certain times when an
action occurs. [3]
In other words, past tenses do not necessarily imply past history! Similarly, Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have tenses. It’s an “aspectual” language. This means that the same form of a verb can be translated as either past, present, or future! In fact, prophecies are sometimes written in the past tense. Bottom line, one cannot use the past-tense argument to demonstrate that the authorial intent precludes prophetic material.
Conclusion
Isaiah is seemingly writing about prophecy, and the suffering servant is clearly not the nation of Israel but rather a male individual (cf. Rev. 12.5) whose sin offering (Isa. 53.6) is described as a sacrifice for the sins of the people (cf. Rom. 3.23-25; Heb. 9.26b)! He is also described as “a lamb that is led to the slaughter,” reminiscent of the “lamb without . . . blemish” (1 Pet. 1.19; cf. Lev. 4.32), the so-called sin offering sacrifice according to the Mosaic Law! Upon further scrutiny, Isaiah 49 ff. and, especially, Isaiah 53 are explicit references that are more in line with New Testament Soteriology than with the Judaic interpretation of the nation of Israel!
In fact, according to “The Dying Messiah Redux” article, by atheist historian Richard Carrier, the notion of a dying messiah predates Christianity and can also be found in the Talmud: “b.Sanhedrin 98b explicitly says the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is the messiah.” What is more, “b.Sanhedrin 93b says the messiah will endure great suffering . . . and b.Sukkah 52a-b likewise has a dying-and-rising ‘Christ son of Joseph’ ideology in it . . . even saying (quoting Zechariah 12:10) that this messiah will be ‘pierced’ to death.” Carrier concludes:
there is no plausible way later Jews would
invent interpretations of their scripture that
supported and vindicated Christians. They
would not invent a Messiah with a father
named Joseph who dies and is resurrected.
They would not proclaim Isaiah 53 to be
about the messiah and admit that Isaiah
there predicted the messiah would die and
be resurrected. That was the very chapter
Christians were using to prove their case
(and which scholars like Bart Ehrman keep
insisting only Christians saw as messianic).
So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief
that predates Christian evangelizing, even if
the evidence survives only in later sources.
——-
Notes
1 All Scripture quotes are from Michael D. Coogan (ed.), “The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha”: New Revised Standard Version (4th rev. edn; New York: Oxford U., 2010).
2 The Hebrew text is from Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph (eds.), “Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia” (4th rev. edn; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1967-77).
3 Stanley E. Porter, “Idioms of the Greek New Testament” (2nd edn; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), p. 25.
——-
FUCK NO
There’s a clown episode in Supernatural and I’m not about that life.
skipping this shit, idc if Dean actually fucking dies this time. I’m not sitting around for this shit.
THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS. THANK YOU The thing I absolutely adore about Don Hertzfeldt is that his art is genuinely emotionally deep and has very deep themes. nowadays "deep" content can be summed up as "phone bad" and "isn't life so horrible", which ironically is specifically made to be appealing to a wide audience for internet clicks. It is the antithesis to what Rejected stands for. I would also like to point out probably my favorite Simpsons couch gag made by Don Hertzfeldt:
this has a lot of references to world of tomorrow and his other works But the one thing that I got from this short is that it was most likely about how the Simpsons is NEVER allowed to die, slowly becoming a grotesque mush of marketability and cheap catchphrases. It is a direct criticism about how the Simpsons' corpse has been puppeteered for 20 years after it's death for the sake of milking the franchise for everything that it has got. Thousands of years later it is an unrecognizable mass that only resembles the Simpsons on a surface level, and there are cryptic advertisements flashing on the screen. Don hertzfelt is a literary genius and I can only hope to reach his level of brilliance when it comes to his storytelling and art.
just saw someone online talking about don hertzfeldt's "rejected" like it was just some "lol so random" youtube video from the early 2000s and like... yeah, it was funny! and I'm sure the randomness and memeability were a lot of what made it go viral. but I'm sad that it's been remembered that way.
like, that short film was about creativity and capitalism and how imagination is stifled and destroyed when it's forced into the box of "marketability", leading to mental anguish on the part of the artist. it's a message that's only become more and more poignant over the years as all art has slowly been reduced to "content" on the internet, particularly youtube, and I still rewatch it regularly.
yes, the fake ads in it were silly and random and violent and weird, but that's because he was purposefully trying to create the least marketable art possible. it has sex and violence and grotesque imagery all wrapped up in a cutesy art style, and it's the exact opposite of the glossy animation you get in marketing. moreover, the point was that the animations became more and more disjointed and "random" and awful as they were forced to exist in a corporate vacuum devoid of any real meaning. that's why the very world they were living in fell apart in the end.
the whole thing! was a very blatant commentary on the damage that commercialization does to art!
and, in a bout of tragic but entirely predictable irony, the art style that he used for "rejected" was immediately stolen, made more palatable for mass consumption, and used for pop tart commercials. it's not so much the death of the author as it is greedy companies shanking the author and then looting their corpse, y'know? it's completely cleaving any marketability from the shambling corpse of their art and leaving the rest for the buzzards.
it's also odd that they listed the short as being something you'd only know about if you hang out on the weird part of the internet because like... y'all know that short was nominated for an oscar, right? that seems about as mainstream as recognition for animated shorts can get. I have literally gone to showings of don hertzfeldt films at major film festivals. he's well known in the animation field.
idk man! I don't have anything against the lol random style of humor from the early days of youtube (I miss it, actually) but to just boil a painfully earnest short film about the devaluing of any creativity that is not palatable to the mass market and the way that artists' souls are slowly killed as they create art solely for corporate interests down to the gifs and memes that emerged from it has me like
man, media literacy really is getting bad these days.
i think i got sister-zoned by the guy i liked i wanna cry i thought he was into me- he literally said when some1 complimented us as couples 'Oh no, i just see her as a sister' lemme just brood and become and a black mass thank you very much
Rejected!
And so the answer i have been waiting for was finally out. Thank you... for making me wait and think i finally found it. I am not mad at you. I am just sad coz i put my hopes up again and as usual the fate had fun playing with my feelings... I'll try to be smarter next time.
Rejected by God?
A Draft for a Book Cover I once made that was rejected in an early stage...
Ahahahaha... my Toast-Project! This photo was part of a five-photos-series I made for application at art school... of course I was rejected.