“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace“ (Isaiah 9:6 KJV)
The Egyptian Queen Hetepheres sat on a throne just like this picture shows, around 2550 BC. This reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian throne helps see what Isaiah was talking about in Isaiah 9:6, because the language Isaiah uses about the coming king has a distinctly Egyptian ring to it. This is probably the kind of seat Isaiah imagined when he wrote this poem.
The Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East describes the painstaking process of throne reconstruction at https://hmane.harvard.edu/recreating-throne-of-egyptian-queen-hetepheres. The list of materials sounds like something from the construction of the Hebrew Tabernacle: cedar, bright blue faience tiles (a special color from secret Egyptian technology), gold foil, gesso, cordage seating, and copper.
When an Egyptian ruler ascended to the throne, the coronation ceremony had precise rules. The ruler would be called by five over-the-top names, declaring him the son of God (reference below). Isaiah uses similarly over-the-top names — he just uses four rather than five — and his language seems to mimic the Egyptian coronation ceremony.
In the first fulfillment of this prophecy, I believe this child was Hezekiah. When the original speakers said this king was “son of God” (see Psalm 2:7), how literally did they mean it? They might have been thinking metaphorically. But centuries later, this prophecy was fulfilled for a second time, if anything, more literally than before. The over-the-top terms that were metaphors for Hezekiah were literal reality for Jesus. Again, this is how God works, unfolding and increasing meaning over time.
The way Isaiah’s words gain meaning over time and become more literal is very different from the decay and corruption of ordinary words, including the Egyptian coronation words which we no longer use. God took this human ceremony and expanded it. The people asked for a king who was a son of God. So God sent His only Son, to two wooden thrones: he descended to a manger, and ascended to a cross.
Of the four names in Isaiah 9:6, “wonderful counselor” has always seemed the least impressive to me. But that’s because we’ve drained the color out of the word wonderful, with overuse and misapplication to not-so-wonderful things. I’m used to “wonderful” in an ironic tone. I’m used to counselors who give self-interested and combative advice, like the “Princes of War” described in December 2. Truly wonderful counsel is subversive, unexpected, and not of this world.
Isaiah shows us what wonderful counsel really is, when he uses the root Hebrew word for wonder (pe·le) three times later in the book: “Therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things (lə·hap̄·lî) with this people, with wonder (hap̄·lê) upon wonder (wā·p̄e·le); and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” (29:14 ESV) The Hebrew root word “p-l” shows up four different ways in these two verses, always surprising us in a different form of the word, but shining with the light of God’s eternal meaning, which shakes and strains our reality.
Paul quotes Isaiah 29:14 in 1 Corinthians 1:19. The wisdom of Jesus, the “wonderful counselor,” was certainly hidden from the wise. But it was there for all with eyes to see, in Christ. The Egyptians said their rulers were descended from false gods, so the One True God sent a “wonderful” ruler in a way that no one expected. No one, that is, except those who studied the words of God through Isaiah and other prophets.
Another wonderful transformation comes through the phrase “the government shall be upon His shoulder.” In the first fulfillment of this prophecy, Isaiah is saying that this third child will lift the oppressive burdens of attacking empires, as God did through Gideon: “For you have broken the yoke that burdened them and the rod that beat their shoulders. You have defeated the nation that oppressed and exploited your people, just as you defeated the army of Midian long ago.” (9:4 GNT) The government was on King Hezekiah’s shoulder, certainly, and the Assyrian Empire was defeated, all right.
But Isaiah’s just getting started. Later in his book, Isaiah writes of Hezekiah’s Prime Minister, named Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, that his shoulder will carry a burden, but this one a key signifying power, perhaps of wonderful counsel: “And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be for a glorious throne to his father’s house.” (22:22-23 KJV)
In the first fulfillment of this, Eliakim was a public servant who saw the country through a siege. But this language seems too big for that, a sign that God will fill in these words with additional meaning in the days to come. In Revelation 3:7, Jesus directly quotes Isaiah 22:22, saying he now holds “the key of David,” and in Revelation 1:18, we’re told what doors that key opens: Jesus says I “have the keys of hell and of death.” (KJV) As the first meaning was fulfilled in Hezekiah’s Prime Minister, the second meaning is fulfilled much more in Christ.
The man who carried the cross on his shoulder, a cross we who follow him must also carry, that man was God Himself, who died, was buried, and was raised to the right hand of the Father. He now carries the keys of hell and of death, and what he opens no one can shut. The governing of the whole world is on his shoulder in ways beyond what the original hearers of Isaiah, or even we ourselves at the end of the ages, can ask or imagine.
I can’t even really understand all that this means, but I can follow Isaiah and John the author of Revelation to see that God has been saying this same kind of thing for thousands of years, more clearly and more vividly as we learn to understand it. And this is just the first name! More on the others tomorrow.
(Reference: “Whose Child Is This? Reflections on the Speaking Voice in Isaiah 9:5,” J. J. M. Roberts, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 115-129. Roberts argues that the Hebrew coronation ceremony was a direct copy of the Egyptian ceremony as a “birth” of the King as son of God, rather than a watered-down “adoption” of the King as son of God. Considering that the second fulfillment of the prophecy involved an actual birth, I’m inclined to side with this author that it meant something powerful to the original hearers.)