And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

(Luke 1:31–33)

When Jewish friends hear Christians call Yeshua “the Son of God,” some flinch. The phrase can sound like crude mythology: Did God have intercourse, impregnate a woman, and generate a demi-god? The answer is no — emphatically no. Scripture does not speak of divine sexuality. “Son of God” is Israel’s family-language, a rich set of metaphors and promises that culminate in a mystery: God making Himself known and near in the Messiah.

Son-language is already Jewish, not pagan

Long before the New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures call various figures “sons” of God. Angels are called “sons of God” (Job 1:6; 38:7). Israel is “my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22), and Israel’s children are “sons of the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 14:1). The Davidic king hears God’s covenantal oath: “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Samuel 7:14). None of these lines suggests sexuality. They describe relationship, representation, and royal vocation. If angels, Israel, and David’s heirs can be “sons” in this sense, is it surprising that the promised King-Messiah, Israel’s representative par excellence, is called “Son of God”?

Pagan stories often describe a god consorting with a woman and siring a half-divine offspring. The Gospel tells a different story: the Creator who needs no consort speaks a human life into being by his Spirit, as he spoke worlds into being by his word. The child is not a demi-god caught between two pantheons. He is fully human from Mary, fully divine from the Father, the one in whom heaven and earth meet because God has chosen to dwell with us.

The royal Son — how the Bible uses “begetting”

Psalm 2 gives the classic royal backdrop:

I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have begotten you.”

(Psalm 2:7)

In ancient Israel, “begetting” language in coronation psalms marks enthronement and adoption into God’s royal service. It is covenant, not biology. The same psalm promises the nations as inheritance to this son (Psalm 2:8) and presses a startling invitation: “Kiss the son…” or, as many Jewish translations render, “embrace purity.” However one translates that contested line, Psalm 2 frames the king as God’s son in the sense of authority, mission, and worshipful allegiance. The New Testament does not invent this; it recognizes Yeshua in it.

From metaphor to mystery — Israel’s “Word” and “Wisdom”

The Hebrew Bible already asks whether God’s presence can come closer than words on a page. His Wisdom is personified as existing “before the beginning of the earth” (Proverbs 8). His Word creates, heals, and runs swiftly (Psalm 33:6; 147:15). His “Angel of the LORD” bears the divine name and speaks in the first person as God (Exodus 3; 23:20–21). These are not “other gods,” but ways Scripture shows the Holy One making Himself present and active. The New Testament gathers these threads and says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:1, 14). In other words, the Son is the way God comes near — God’s own self-expression in a human life.

Daniel’s “one like a son of man” and God’s throne

Daniel sees “thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his throne” (Daniel 7:9). Then “one like a son of man” comes with the clouds of heaven and receives “dominion and glory and kingship” that never ends (Daniel 7:13–14). In the vision itself, the Ancient of Days is God, and the “son of man” is a human-like figure who shares God’s authority and receives universal worshipful service. Later Jewish and Christian readers saw here a heavenly, messianic figure. Yeshua takes this title for himself, linking his identity with Daniel’s human-one who shares God’s rule. Again, this is covenantal glory, not any crude biology.

“God with us” in a womb — without sexual myth

When the angel tells Miriam, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35), the language echoes the cloud of God’s presence overshadowing the tabernacle (Exodus 40:35). There is no sexual act, no union of deities. The Creator who formed Adam from dust forms a human life within a virgin’s womb by his Spirit. The result is “Immanuel” — God with us — because God himself is present and at work in this child. That is why the angel adds, “the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God” (Luke 1:35).

How Israel already used “Son of God” messianically

Beyond the royal psalms and Davidic covenant, Second Temple Judaism preserved texts that speak in “Son of God” terms. An Aramaic apocalypse from Qumran, often cataloged as 4Q246, speaks of a coming figure called “Son of God” and “Son of the Most High,” language that — whatever one concludes about its precise referent — shows that such titles were already imaginable within a Jewish horizon. The point is not to prove that the community at Qumran believed exactly what the Gospel of Luke would later confess, but to show that calling the hoped-for ruler “Son of God” was not foreign to Jewish ears. It belonged to the air of expectation.

A Jewish path for thinking about a heavenly representative

Centuries after the New Testament period, some Jewish mystical texts portray a principal heavenly agent — Metatron — who bears the divine name and is even called, in one tradition, the “lesser YHWH.” This is not Scripture and not Judaism’s mainstream creed; it is an example of how Jewish imagination made room for a supreme representative who carries God’s authority. I mention it only to say: within Judaism there have been ways (even speculative ones) of speaking about God’s presence mediated through a personal figure. The Gospel’s claim about Yeshua is not that he is a second god, but that the one God has decisively made himself known in him.

So did God “beget” the Son in time — or is the Son eternal?

Scripture speaks in two complementary registers. In history, “today I have begotten you” can mark coronation and resurrection vindication (see Acts 13:33). In God’s own life, the Son belongs to God eternally: “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God.” The early Jewish followers of Yeshua spoke of him both as Israel’s royal Son (within history) and as God’s eternal Son (in God’s own life). That is why they confess him as the one through whom “all things were made” (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17), and yet also as David’s heir who reigns forever over Jacob’s house (Luke 1:33).

Why “Son of God” does not violate the Shema

Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

(Deuteronomy 6:4)

Nothing in the New Testament abandons this confession. To honor the Son “just as” we honor the Father (John 5:23) is to honor the one God who has revealed himself in and through the Son. The Son is not a rival deity. He is the visible self-giving of the invisible God, Israel’s King who bears God’s name and rule.

Psalm 2 revisited — why worship of the Son is worship of God

Psalm 2 moves from the nations’ rebellion to God’s derisive laughter to the installation of his king on Zion. The king is called “my son.” He inherits the nations. He administers the justice and mercy of God. Whether one reads the psalm first in relation to David and then forward to the Messiah (common in Jewish commentary), or reads it directly as messianic (also a classical approach), the logic is the same: allegiance to the Son is allegiance to the LORD who set him on the throne. That is the New Testament claim about Yeshua: not that we have two gods but that the one God reigns through his Son.

Proverbs 30 — “What is his name, and what is his son’s name?”

Agur asks a chain of questions whose answer is plainly “God” — who ascends and descends, gathers the wind, binds the waters, establishes the ends of the earth (Proverbs 30:4). Then he asks,

What is his name, and what is his son’s name?

(Proverbs 30:4)

Some Jewish readers answer: Israel is God’s son. Others hear in it a riddle that nudges us to the Messiah, the one who makes God known. Either way, the verse shows that “son-language” belongs in a Jewish wisdom book without mythology attached. It invites readers to ask how God makes himself known. The Gospel’s answer is bold: in Yeshua, we now know the Name and the Son’s name.

How the title works in Yeshua’s life

When Yeshua forgives sins with authority, Israel’s teachers ask, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” When he commands the winds and waves, his disciples whisper, “Who then is this?” When he stands before the high priest and identifies himself with Daniel’s “Son of Man” who comes with the clouds, the council recognizes his claim to share God’s rule. When he rises from the dead, the Father publicly vindicates the Son’s identity. Each scene is a window: the Son shows us the Father.

A Jewish logic of sonship — representative Israel

The logic is simple: if Israel is God’s son, then the Messiah — Israel’s ultimate Son — is the true and ultimate Son of God.

Israel is called God’s son; the king embodies the people; the faithful remnant stands for the whole. The Messiah, then, is Israel-in-person: the righteous Israelite who fulfills Israel’s calling, suffers for Israel’s sins, and brings Israel’s light to the nations. To call him “Son of God” is to say that in him Israel’s God is acting and Israel’s vocation is fulfilled. That is why Luke ties “Son of the Most High” to “the throne of David” and “the house of Jacob” — royal title and covenant people held together (Luke 1:32–33).

Conclusion

“Son of God” is not a pagan biography; it is Israel’s own royal and revelatory word. It names the way the one God of Israel makes himself known and near — in the Davidic Messiah who bears God’s rule, reveals God’s heart, and brings God’s salvation to Israel and the nations. In Yeshua, born of Mary by the Spirit, enthroned through suffering and resurrection, God is with us.

If the Son reveals the Father, we understand God’s heart by observing Yeshua’s life. Power humbles itself to wash feet. Holiness approaches sinners with mercy and truth. Authority brings healing rather than exploitation. If the Son makes us God’s children through grace, then we receive adoption, not a status we earn.

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