“Come let us reason together,” Isaiah says. An exhortation to logical deduction with the help of syllogism?
Certainly, logic and syllogisms are involved, but the verb “reason” ( yakach ) is commonly translated as “argue” (Job 13:15) or “dispute” (Job 13:3; 22:4) or “judge” (Isaiah 11:3) or “reprove” (Job 6:25)) even “punish” (Job 5:17). Reasoning for Isaiah is reasoning together ; it is a personal, social activity, not synapses firing in an individual’s isolated brain.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
