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Conceiving without the usual...?

Lila

Lila

Member
Female
I have stumbled upon what would appear a parallel to what happened to Mary:
He said, “At this season, when the time comes around, you will embrace a son.” (2 Kings 4:16)

But I always thought that it was only Mary that conceived through the Holy Spirit alone.

My question is why then such a parallel?
 
I don't see a large parallel. This woman was married (v14). There are multiple instances in scripture of YHWH healing infertility: Sarah, Rachel, Hannah... Fertility is something He likes to heal to bless people, because children are a blessing. This parallels those situations, but not so much Mary's.
 
See, I haven't retrieved that infertility would have been the issue when reading the verse as for some reason the emphasis seemed to be on the husband being too old. I appreciate your view as it also makes sense.
 
Lila, I like you, so don't take this the wrong way.

I think you see a parallel for several reasons. First, when we read the words "the Lord opens and closes the womb" we in our holier-than-thou modern day oh-so-scientific idiocy tend to think that biology trumps all.

Scripture says that Sarah was long past the point of having children. Let's call that menopausal. She was 90. Abraham was 100. I think it's great that obviously they were still wrecking the bed at that age (I have a great-great grandfather like that, he fathered my great-grandfather when he was 82. His wife (#3) was close to 50 years younger than him. My great-grandfather was not his last child...). Yet, Sarah was long past the point of having children. Mary was not yet at the point of having children due to her virginity. In both cases God chose to step beyond biology and cause them to have children.

In both cases it really had nothing to do with the husband from a biological standpoint. Try explaining to women now-days that by the time a woman hits 30 she only has about 3% of her eggs left. True. And by the time she hits 40, only 5% of women can have children. But... guess what? It's all a statistical lie.

When our 5th child was being born, there was a Mennonite woman in the next room. She was in her early fifties and having her 22nd child. Think about that. She spent sixteen and a half years pregnant. Not releasing eggs. If there were some times when she was nursing and the menstruation was suppressed then it's easily possible she spent twenty years without ovulating. In other words, she still had a supply of eggs. Sarah did not fit that profile.

Bottom line: The conception of Isaac was supernatural because there was no fertile woman- Abraham fathered other children after Sarah died. The conception of Jesus was supernatural because there was no fertile man.
 
I like your comment just to confirm that you are saying: FollowingHim is spot on and I have been carried away due to the seemingly "supernatural" forces at work surrounding the other stories, examples of women that conceived despite the odds. Correct?

I am not offended just to be clear. After all I am trying to grasp the specifics of passages that are not too obvious to me, I mean we all read stuff into what we read when we read it anyway.
 
@Lila

I'm not sure I have an answer for you, but I'll try. Samuel didn't explain what he meant and I'm not going to try to put words in his mouth. Likewise, I don't know what it means to you to be "carried away."

However, I see a difference between infertility (a woman who should be able to get pregnant but isn't) being ended, like with Rachael and Hannah such that they bore children... and a woman who could not have children getting pregnant and having a child. There are examples of both, but the only two examples I can think of in the latter category are Sarah and Mary. In Sarah's case, she had a potent husband but was no longer fertile herself (Genesis 18:11), being long past the age when her body had stopped being fertile. In Mary's case, she was fertile but had no man to impregnate her. In both cases pregnancy under such conditions was impossible, yet because God caused it, both became with child.

This is why I described the birth of both Isaac and Jesus as supernatural. That, I think, agrees with your original post, which means that I did not agree with FH, who characterized Rachel, Hannah and Sarah as all being in the same class.

Interestingly, Jacob was about 77* years old when he came to see his uncle Laban, who would have been somewhere around 117 years old at that time. Jacob worked for seven years and thus he was 84 years old when he got both Leah and Rachel. How old was Rachel? We don't know, but she was the younger sister. We do know that it was not until seven years later that Rachel had Joseph, who was born at the end of the 14 years of Jacob's labor for Laban, when Jacob was 91 years old.

We don't have any idea how old Leah and Rachel were, but Genesis 29:31 says God opened Leah's womb but Rachel, the younger sister, was barren. Which implies that she was in her fertile years but unable to have children. Still, there is nothing in the text to indicate either Hannah or Rachel or Leah were past child-bearing years, nothing to indicate that anything unexplainable by simple biology happened. In both Mary and Sarah's cases, it was completely impossible in terms of biology.

*Jacob was 130 years old when he went to Egypt after two years of famine. Genesis 47:9. Joseph was 30 when he stood before the Pharoh and interpreted the dreams. Genesis 41:46. The dreams forecast 7 good years followed by 7 bad years, so Joseph was 39 when Jacob was 130. That means Jacob was 91 when Joseph was born at the end of the 14 years of work for Laban, which means that Jacob was 77 when he went to Laban. Jacob lived for another 17 years in Egypt and died at the age of 147.
 
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