This is a particularly challenging and important passage. Only through a Hebraic analysis of the language, like that of Bivin's here, is the great revelation of this passage accessible. First, let us consider what David Bivin is offering.
First, by bringing out the play on עליה (aliyah, going up), we begin immediately to see an association between Elijah going up to Mount Carmel and the thought of James and John in asking if they should call fire down from heaven.
Next, we see from Bivin's notes that the text is simply saying that when the time came for Yehoshua to go up to Jerusalem he did so.
Bivin gives us to understand that "his face was walking" simply means that he was walking. In dialogue with Bivin, we might offer that idiom's like this may be only poetic ways of saying what might otherwise be said simply in a prosaic manner but when a language uses an idiom like this there is some semantic reason for it. At the very least, the poetry of the idiom creates and accent of thought. Here we might suggest that the accent of thought is that there is a special gravitas in his walking.
Once we have Bivin's clear and simple translation, it is possible to hear from the text the message that this episode is a lesson in "not competing with evil doers," as David Bivin has read out from the passage. However, using his translation, it is possible to also hear something more than this. It is possible to hear a message in this passage about the right way of revealing Mashiach.
It was to a Samaritan woman that Yehoshua said, "Salvation is of the Jews". Here two different attitudes about what it means that salvation is of the Jews might be discerned. On is the attitude of James/Yaacov and John/Yochanan at this time. The other is the attitude of Yehoshua.
The covenant of God's peace is not simply to be understood as a model of Messianic pacifism that the world is to learn in the Messianic Era. It is a covenant of the salvation of the Jewish people which turns the world inside out and upside down, overthrowing the turmoil inherent in the time of this "day of death" by ruling over it with the peace of Eternity.
The covenant of God's peace is not simply to be understood as a model of Messianic pacifism that the world is to learn in the Messianic Era. It is a covenant of the salvation of the Jewish people which turns the world inside out and upside down, overthrowing the turmoil inherent in the time of this "day of death" by ruling over it with the peace of Eternity.
