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These are beautiful and intriguing thoughts.

"Now it makes perfect sense at Cana when he said Ma li v'lach ? It was a tender question in a bond of holy love between mother and son; What is there between you and me ? Love, trust, faith until death and beyond. What can I do for you ? "

I never heard this interpretation of the phrase "Ma li v'lach?" I'd always heard it was an expression of, at best, uninvolvement ("What's it to you or me?") Can you explain this a little further?

Thanks for these good musings.

These are beautiful and intriguing thoughts. "Now it makes perfect sense at Cana when he said Ma li v'lach ? It was a tender question in a bond of holy love between mother and son; What is there between you and me ? Love, trust, faith until death and beyond. What can I do for you ? "

I never heard this interpretation of the phrase "Ma li v'lach?" I'd always heard it was an expression of, at best, uninvolvement ("What's it to you or me?") Can you explain this a little further?

Thanks for these good musings.

In modern Hebrew the idiomatic phrase can have a decidedly negative meaning. I was researching the Cana passage, because the common interpretations do not ring true and came across it here: Credit for the kernel must go to Michael Heiser, PhD.

While doing some reverse interlinear work a few days ago, I came across Josh 15:18. The verse concerns Caleb’s newly-won bride:

18 When she came to him, she urged him to ask her father for a field. And she got off her donkey, and Caleb said to her, �What do you want?� My interest was drawn to the question: “What do you want?” The Hebrew literally reads: “What to you?”

This is a fairly common Semiticism that I have run across a number of times before. And each time the idea pops into my head that I ought to write an article on it — since it is the idiomatic expression behind the statement/question Jesus says to his mother Mary in John 2:4. Jesus says, literally, “What to me and to you, O woman?” (“woman” is in the vocative case for direct address.)� Many readers mistake the question as a statement of irritation on Jesus’ part, and some translations don’t do much to avoid that misapprehension.

In Josh 15, Caleb is portrayed as wanting to be kind to his new bride. He is not irritated; he wants to do something for her to make her happy. This is the pretty clearly the case in some of the other 18 occurrences of the precise phrase found in Josh 15:18. Some examples (to my eye anyway) are: 2 Sam 14:5; 1 Kings 1:16; Esther 5:3. My point is that the phrase is at times clearly a gentle one.

The similar phrase (“What to me?”) also occurs in the Hebrew Bible, at times in combination with “to you,” as in John 2:4. The most generic way to capture what the full statement (“What to me to you?”) means is “what is there that concerns me and you?”� Context should steer the translator to word choices that move the translation from this neutral meaning to something that captures the situation, whether it is adversarial or congenial. There is no reason to see John’s use of this idiomatic expression as indicative of irritation, or that his mother had become insufferable to Jesus. When Jesus says to Mary, “What to me to you?”, he isn’t saying “What is it now, lady?” He’s basically asking his mother, who brings a concern to him, “What can I do for you?”

Anyway, just a bit of a hobby-horse issue for me that I periodically run into. On to weightier things.

you have a Messiah irritated with his mother so much that he insults her in the presence of the servants but goes on and performs a miracle at her request anyway, with her having spoiled his opening debut. This is incongruent with the rest of scripture and the Messiah. It would fit a petulant teenager though, which Jesus never could be. If in the modern view they celebrate this as his Declaration of Independence against an imagined overbearing Jewish mother (who willingly risked being stoned to death to bear him, not to mention murdered by Herod to preserve him, and these are just what was written), then it is cognitive dissonance. He was 30, and had been holy and righteous his entire life.
Mary, not responding to any imagined rebuke, tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them. Of course the account is attributed to the Apostle John who had become Mary's son at the Lord's command and what better source for the event but a participant in the exchange ?
Contrast the common adversarial interpretation to the death and resurrection account of Lazarus event where he is asked to raise Lazarus and many do not really believe the dead saint is already alive. He wept and called Lazarus forth for their benefit. He always pleased our Father, who art in heaven. Blessed be His name.