NT authors play with riddles
There are may types of riddles in the OT and NT. The NT authors use them to teach how to read the OT.
Matthew says there are 42 generation in Jesus’s genealogy, but only lists 41. Do you think he couldn’t count? When you solve the riddle of the missing generation you discover something about Christ.
He said that Jesus was named Yeshua to fulfill a prophecy he would be called Emmanuel. Those are two different names which have two different meanings. In what way does it fulfill prophecy?
Yeshua has to represent “God with us” somehow when it’s meaning is “God’s salvation”. His name has a pun, a word that sounds similar (the ending hard rather than soft) meaning God humbled. The humbling of Christ is his incarnation and emptying of himself. God among men. This is God with us.
A second riddle is played by the formation of the word. You will think this strange, but you will see as we go, that God uses this form of riddling in the formation of words.
Yeshua sounds like Yahweh with a ‘sh’ in the middle. Yahweh is the name of God. The sh (the Hebrew letter shin) has a metaphor for the church being the ‘increase’ of the Word of God. We are his workmanship. This is also “God with us”.
After he gives a riddle using puns, he uses puns to point to the prophecy of the Nazarite law, saying Jesus was prophesied to be called a Nazarene.
The Nazarite wore his hair long and God called it his righteousness, yet nature tells us that long hair on a man is a shame (according to the NT). Jesus, though righteous, bore our shame on the cross.
The Nazarite doesn’t drink wine or strong drink, representing grace and law, because Jesus was the author, not partaker of them.
The Nazarite doesn’t touch a dead body, but if he does it sets him free of his oath without penalty. Jesus was buried in an unused tomb, and his own dead body set him free from the Nazarite oath he took at the last supper.