Isaiah 7:14 and the Virgin

"Only a part of the prophecy was literally fulfilled.  The Incarnate Son is named by divine command “Jesus,” not Immanuel." — John D. W. Watts, Word Biblical Commentary, 1985¹

Summary

Matthew 1:22–23 says that Jesus was born of a virgin "so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled:  'Look!  The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son.'"²  The prophet is Isaiah, and the verse is Isaiah 7:14.  This article reads that verse in its own chapter, weighs its words in Hebrew and Greek, asks who read it as a prophecy of the Messiah and when, and then asks what Matthew meant by "fulfilled."  It scores the verse by the eight tests of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy.

The answer is that Isaiah 7:14 carries no weight as a prediction of the virgin birth, and that Matthew, read on his own terms, does not need it to.

1. The sign had a clock, and the clock ran out in Ahaz's lifetime. About 734 BC the kings of Damascus and Israel threatened Jerusalem. Isaiah told King Ahaz that before a child about to be born could tell good from evil, "the land whose two kings you fear will be desolate" (7:16). A second child in the next chapter carries the same deadline (8:4). Assyrian records put the siege and annexation of Damascus in 733–732 BC and the killing of Pekah of Israel soon after. Both kings were gone within about two years, and Samaria itself fell in 722 or 720.
2. The mother is an almah, a young woman. The word occurs seven times in the Hebrew Bible. It never says whether the woman is a virgin, and the lexicons, the critical commentators and some evangelicals agree that it does not mean "virgin." The best conservative argument is that almah is never used of a married woman, so the girl would normally have been a virgin. That argument is partly right about the word and does not reach the conclusion: nothing in the verse says she conceives without a man.
3. The Greek "virgin" is real and pre-Christian, but it raised no expectation. The Septuagint, translated in Egypt before 132 BC, reads parthenos. The same translation calls Dinah parthenos after she was raped, and renders almah as "young woman" in Exodus 2:8. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, copied before Christ, has almah in the Hebrew, as the later Masoretic text does.
4. No Jew is known to have read the verse as messianic, before or after Jesus. The Aramaic Targum calls the child of 9:6 and the shoot of 11:1 the Messiah, and leaves 7:14 alone. The earliest Jewish reading on record, reported by Justin Martyr about AD 155, refers the sign to King Hezekiah. That reading fails on the Bible's own numbers, as Jerome, Rashi and Ibn Ezra all pointed out: Hezekiah was already about nine years old when his father began to reign.
5. The child is not named in the text, and five candidates have defenders. Hezekiah, a later son of Ahaz, a son of Isaiah, any child born that year, and the Messiah. The strongest case for a royal or messianic child is the chain of passages that follows: "your land, O Immanuel" (8:8), the throne-name child of 9:6–7, and the shoot of Jesse in 11:1. The strongest case against is that 8:3–4 gives the same sign and the same deadline to Isaiah's own son, conceived in the ordinary way.
6. Matthew's "fulfil" is not a claim of prediction. Matthew uses the same formula of Hosea 11:1, "I called my son out of Egypt," which is about the exodus, and of Jeremiah 31:15, Rachel weeping, which is about the exile. Evangelical commentators such as R. T. France and Walter Kaiser say plainly that those texts are not predictions. Matthew sees patterns in Israel's story repeated in Jesus's life. That is a claim of meaning, and it makes no claim of foreknowledge that a skeptic could test.
7. The score. The verse passes Test 1, since it was written long before Jesus. As a prediction of a virgin birth it fails Test 2, because it commits to a near deadline and says nothing about how the child is conceived. It fails Test 3, because no one read it that way before the event. It carries no weight as evidence of foreknowledge.
8. What a conservative reader keeps. The Greek "virgin" is not a Christian forgery. The virgin-birth story is not likely to have been invented from this verse, because no one expected it. And reading Isaiah 7–11 as a whole as pointing to a divine son of David is a serious position held by careful scholars. What a conservative reader gives up is the use of Isaiah 7:14 as a proof that the prophet foresaw the virgin birth. Edward Young, Alec Motyer and John Oswalt, the strongest defenders of a messianic reading, each concede the near deadline in some form.

Part 1: The crisis and the sign's clock

The war of 734 BC

About 734 BC, King Rezin of Damascus and King Pekah of Israel marched on Jerusalem.  Isaiah 7:1 says they "were unable to prevail against it."²  Their plan, in 7:6, was to "set up the son of Tabeel as its king" in place of Ahaz.²  Isaiah tells Ahaz not to be afraid of "these two stubs of smoking logs" (7:4).  He then offers him a sign:  "Ask for a confirming sign from the LORD your God.  You can even ask for something miraculous."  Ahaz refuses:  "I don’t want to put the LORD to a test."  Isaiah answers that the Lord will give a sign anyway.²

The crisis is history, not legend.  Second Kings 16:7–9 says Ahaz sent tribute to Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria, who "attacked Damascus and captured it" and "executed Rezin."²  Tiglath-pileser's own inscriptions record a forty-five-day siege of Damascus in 733 BC, and the editors of his inscriptions date its conquest and annexation to 732.  His summary inscription lists "Jehoahaz of the land Judah," Ahaz under his full name, among the kings who paid him.³³  Another inscription says of Israel:  "[I/they] killed Peqah, their king, and I placed Hoshea [as king o]ver them."³  Samaria, Pekah's capital, fell a decade later.  The Babylonian Chronicle says that Shalmaneser V "ravaged Samaria" in a reign that ended in 722 BC, and his successor Sargon II claims to have taken the city and carried off "27,290 of its inhabitants," probably in 720.⁴⁵  Second Kings 17:6 puts the capture in the ninth year of Hoshea.²

The sign

The sign is in 7:14–16:

For this reason the Lord himself will give you a confirming sign. Look, this young woman is about to conceive and will give birth to a son. You, young woman, will name him Immanuel. He will eat sour milk and honey, which will help him know how to reject evil and choose what is right. Here is why this will be so: Before the child knows how to reject evil and choose what is right, the land whose two kings you fear will be desolate.²

The sign has a clock.  It runs from the boy's birth to the age at which he "knows how to reject evil and choose what is right."  That is a few years at most, and by then the two kings' lands will be "desolate."  The next verse widens the threat to Judah itself:  the Lord will bring on Ahaz's house "a time unlike any since Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria!"²

The next chapter repeats the clock with a second child.  Isaiah's wife, "the prophetess," conceives and bears a son, and the Lord says, "Name him Maher Shalal Hash Baz, for before the child knows how to cry out ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria."²  Then the Assyrian flood "will spread his wings out over your entire land, O Immanuel," and the section ends, "For God is with us!"²  In Hebrew that last phrase is the name itself, immanu el.⁶

The deadline was met

The two kings Ahaz feared were both gone within about two years of the oracle.  Rezin's city was taken in 732, and Pekah was killed and replaced by Hoshea, an Assyrian vassal, by 731.  The plunder of Samaria named in 8:4 followed in 722 or 720, twelve or fourteen years after the oracle.⁷  The sign's own deadline was met in Ahaz's lifetime.  This is the one point on which every commentator quoted in this article agrees, whatever else each believes.  Raymond Brown, the Catholic scholar whose commentary on the infancy narratives is the standard critical work, states it:  the sign "was intended as a sign to this disbelieving monarch during the Syro-Ephraimite war of 734 and must refer to something that took place during that year or shortly thereafter."⁸  Hans Wildberger, a Zurich Old Testament scholar:  "The sign which is given to Ahaz makes sense only if it is visible within a relatively short period of time."⁹  The evangelical Alec Motyer, who defends a messianic reading, grants that "Immanuel’s birth is imminent, and surely Isaiah’s hearers would have understood it in this way."¹⁰

Justin Martyr, the second-century Christian who first argued the virgin-birth reading against a Jew, bears witness to the clock without meaning to.  The text of Isaiah he quotes runs 8:4 straight into 7:15:  "For before the child knows how to call father or mother, he shall receive the power of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria in presence of the king of Assyria."¹¹  To make that fit Jesus, he had to read the Magi from Arabia as "the power of Damascus" and King Herod as "king of Assyria."¹¹

Is she pregnant already?

One grammatical point is often pressed and settles less than either side hopes.  The Hebrew of 7:14 has no verb for "conceive."  It says the young woman is harah, "pregnant," an adjective whose time comes from context.  The same formula, "behold, you are pregnant and will bear a son and you will call his name," is spoken to Hagar, who is already pregnant (Genesis 16:11), and to Manoah's wife, who is barren and has not yet conceived (Judges 13:3–5).⁶  Rashi read the verse the second way:  "This is actually the future, as we find concerning Manoah’s wife."¹²

Most modern commentators lean to the present.  Wildberger:  "one suspects that the present sense is more likely."⁹  John Walton, an evangelical, translates "an 'almah is pregnant and is about to bear a son."¹³  Otto Kaiser argues the reverse from the syntax, that "Hebrew syntax prevents us from assuming that the birth oracle refers to a woman who is already pregnant."¹⁴  The point matters for one reason.  If she was already pregnant when Isaiah spoke, she was not a virgin in the ordinary way, and a virgin-birth reading must take the verse as a vision of a distant event, as Edward Young did.  If the pregnancy was future, the grammar leaves both readings open.  It does not decide either way whether the mother conceived without a man.

The oldest Hebrew copy

The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, 1QIsa^a, is the oldest complete copy of Isaiah, made in the second century BC.  At 7:14 it has ha-almah, the same word as the medieval Masoretic text.  It differs in three small ways.  It writes the divine name YHWH where the Masoretic text has Adonai.  It writes Immanuel as one word, as the Greek does.  And where the Masoretic text says "and you [or she] will call his name," the scroll has wqr', "and he will call," or "one will call."¹⁵  So no Hebrew copy of the verse from before Christianity reads betulah, the more specific word for a virgin, and none reads anything that would make the conception miraculous.

Part 2: Almah, betulah and parthenos

Every use of almah

The mother in 7:14 is ha-almah, "the young woman."  The word occurs seven times in the Hebrew Bible:  Genesis 24:43, Exodus 2:8, Isaiah 7:14, Psalm 68:25, Proverbs 30:19, and Song of Songs 1:3 and 6:8.  A related plural, alamot, is a musical term in the heading of Psalm 46 and in 1 Chronicles 15:20, which is why Edward Young, counting the plurals as well, found the word "five times in the plural and four in the singular."¹⁶⁶  The masculine elem, "young man," occurs twice, in 1 Samuel 17:56 and 20:22.

The seven uses describe Rebekah at the well (Genesis 24:43), Moses' sister Miriam (Exodus 2:8), girls in a temple procession (Psalm 68:25), girls who love the king (Song 1:3), a group listed after "sixty queens" and "eighty concubines" (Song 6:8), and the woman in "the way of a man with a woman" (Proverbs 30:19).²  Some of these women were certainly unmarried.  None of the seven passages says outright whether the woman was a virgin, and none is about a mother.  Neither of the two standard Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Publication Society versions of 1917 and 1985, renders almah "virgin" in any of the seven.¹⁷¹⁸

Betulah

The Hebrew word usually translated "virgin" is betulah, which occurs fifty times.⁶  It is the word the law uses when virginity is the legal point:  the bride whose virginity is disputed (Deuteronomy 22:13–21), the priest's bride (Leviticus 21:13–14), and Rebekah, "a virgin;  no man had ever been physically intimate with her" (Genesis 24:16).²  But betulah is not a strict technical term either.  It is used as a title for cities and nations, including Babylon, Sidon and Egypt.  It is paired with "young men" to mean the young people of a nation.  And Joel 1:8 compares Judah to a betulah mourning "the husband of her youth."  The Hebrew word for husband there, ba'al, is the ordinary word, though the NET Bible takes it as a husband-to-be.²

This cuts against a common Jewish objection.  Gerald Sigal, a counter-missionary writer, puts it this way:  "The Hebrew for “virgin” is betulah," so "One would, therefore, reasonably expect that if Isaiah 7:14 refers specifically to a virgin, the prophet would have used the technical term betulah so as to leave no doubt."¹⁹  The 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation itself renders betulah "maiden" or "maidens," not "virgin," in thirty-two of the fifty verses.  The same count shows the other side:  in every one of the eleven verses where the context is about sexual status, that translation says "virgin."¹⁸  So betulah would have been clearer than almah, but it would not have been airtight.  Matitiahu Tsevat, in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, finds that betulah "clearly means “virgin”" in only three of its occurrences.²⁰

What the lexicons say

The lexicons agree with each other.  The Brown–Driver–Briggs lexicon defines almah as "young woman (ripe sexually; maid or newly married)."²¹  Wilhelm Gesenius, the great German Hebraist of the early nineteenth century, wrote:  "The notion of unspotted virginity is not that which this word conveys," and "in Isa. loc. cit. the LXX. have incorrectly rendered it παρθένος."  His Christian English translator, Samuel Tregelles, printed a bracketed rejoinder on the next page.  The aim of "seeking to undermine the opinion which would assign the signification of virgin to this word, is clearly to raise a discrepancy between Isa. 7:14, and Matt. 1:23 ... The ancient versions, which gave a different rendering, did so for party purposes, while the LXX., who could have no such motive, render it virgin".²²  Tsevat's article says:  "'almah does not mean “virgin,” although, of course, an ‘almah can be a “virgin.”"²⁰

The critical commentators say the same.  Wildberger:  "the main point of the term is not that she is a virgin.  The basic meaning of the root is apparently “strong, marriageable, fully developed for sexual activity.”  Scholarly research has thus, generally speaking, given up on the translation “virgin”".⁹  So does one evangelical Old Testament scholar.  John Walton concluded in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society that "there is no defensible linguistic logic for suggesting the meaning “virgin” for the Hebrew ‘almâ."¹³  Walton wrote in the same article that he "heartily" affirms the virgin birth.¹³  His verdict on the word is not a verdict on the event.

Medieval Jewish scholars reached the same verdict on their own grounds.  Abraham ibn Ezra, writing in the twelfth century, said a girl is called almah "whether she be a virgin or not," and pointed to Proverbs 30:19:  "in דרך גבר בעלמה the way of a man with a young woman (Prov. 30:19) עלמה is certainly not a virgin".¹²

The conservative case: never a married woman

The best argument on the other side is not that almah means "virgin."  It is that the word is never used of a married woman, so that in Israel an almah would normally be a virgin.  John Oswalt, the evangelical commentator, puts it carefully:  "conservative scholars have frequently pointed out that the word is never used of a married woman in the OT," so "the word denotes a sexually mature, but unmarried, young woman.  It would be axiomatic in Hebrew society that such a woman would be a virgin."  He adds, "While the virginity would not be the main focus ... nonetheless it would still follow."²³

The older conservative scholars made the same case and conceded the same limit.  Robert Dick Wilson of Princeton concluded in 1926 that "None of the ancient languages or versions gives any evidence to show that ‘alma ever meant “a young married woman.”"²⁴  J. Gresham Machen, in his classic defence of the virgin birth, wrote that "there is no place among the seven occurrences of ‘almah in the Old Testament where the word is clearly used of a woman who was not a virgin."  But he granted the word's meaning:  "It may readily be admitted that ‘almah does not actually indicate virginity, as does bethulah; it means rather “a young woman of marriageable age.”  But on the other hand one may well doubt, in view of the usage, whether it was a natural word to use of anyone who was not in point of fact a virgin."²⁵

Alec Motyer argues it from Genesis 24, the one passage where a single woman is called by all three words.  The servant calls Rebekah a "girl," then a betulah "whom no man had known," then an almah, "which is clearly a summary term for ‘female, marriageable, unmarried’."  So, he concludes, "wherever the context allows a judgment, ‘almâ is not a general term meaning ‘young woman’ but a specific one meaning ‘virgin’," and "Isaiah thus used the word which, among those available to him, came nearest to expressing ‘virgin birth’ and which, without linguistic impropriety, opens the door to such a meaning."¹⁰

Even critics grant part of this.  Raymond Brown says the word "puts no stress on her virginity, although de facto, in the light of Israelite ethical and social standards, most girls covered by the range of this term would be virgins."⁸  Wildberger grants that almah "is actually almost always used to designate the unmarried daughter."⁹  Brevard Childs grants that "apart from the controversial reference in Prov. 30:19, the women in all the other references to an 'almâh do actually appear to be virgins."²⁶

Three things limit the argument.

1. Two of the seven uses are doubtful. Proverbs 30:19, "the way of a man with a woman," is followed at once by "This is the way of an adulterous woman."² Ibn Ezra took the almah there as "certainly not a virgin," and Wildberger allows that only there "could the term be understood to include the idea that this is a married woman."⁹ Song 6:8 lists alamot after queens and concubines without saying what they were.
2. The Ugaritic cognate is used of a bride. In the epic of Keret, from the Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, Wildberger notes that "the glmt is clearly the wife (of the king!) who has just been brought home."⁹ A Ugaritic poem about a divine wedding has the line hl glmt tld b[n], "lo the girl will bear a son," the closest parallel anywhere to Isaiah 7:14.²⁷ Its translator Nick Wyatt calls the plot "apparently a pre-marital affair, perhaps the birth of a son," followed by the marriage.²⁸ So "the young woman will bear a son" was a stock way of announcing a birth, and the girl in it was a bride, not a virgin who conceives.
3. Even granting the premise, the conclusion does not follow. If the mother was an unmarried virgin when Isaiah spoke, nothing in the verse says she conceived without a man. An unmarried girl who marries and bears a child within the year fits every word. Motyer himself says that is how Isaiah's hearers would have understood it: "that some girl, at present an ‘almâ, would marry and in due course bear Immanuel."¹⁰

So the Hebrew does not settle the question either way.  Almah does not mean "virgin," and it does not mean "a woman who is not a virgin."  It means a young woman old enough to marry, who in most of its uses was unmarried.  A virgin conception is a different claim, and the verse does not make it.  In the next chapter the matching child is conceived in the ordinary way (8:3).

The cognate languages

The neighbouring languages show the same pattern for both words.  The Akkadian cognate of betulah, batultu, is defined by the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary as "adolescent, nubile girl."  Its editors add:  "The word denotes primarily an age group; only in specific contexts such as the cited section of the Assyrian Code and in NB marriage contracts does it assume the connotation "virgin.""²⁹  In the Ugaritic myths the goddess Anat carries the title btlt, the cognate of betulah, though the same myths have her mate with Baal.  Tsevat takes the title to stress her unchanging youth, not her virginity.²⁰  So even betulah, the word Jewish critics say Isaiah should have used, began as a word for a girl of an age to marry.  Robert Bratcher, writing for Bible translators in 1958, summed up the evidence for almah:  the word "means 'a young woman of sexual maturity' with no reference to sexual experience."³⁰

The Septuagint's parthenos

Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 in Greek, from the Septuagint, which reads hē parthenos, "the virgin."³¹  The Septuagint's Isaiah was translated in Egypt before 132 BC, roughly six hundred years after Isaiah and more than a century before Jesus.³²  So the "virgin" reading is pre-Christian and Jewish.  That is a point for the Christian side, and two charges sometimes made against it fail.  It was not a Christian alteration.  Raymond Brown notes that in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, written about AD 155–160, "the Jewish opponent never denies Justin's explicit claim that parthenos is the LXX reading."⁸  Justin even charged the Jews of his day with perverting "the expositions which your elders that were with Ptolemy king of Egypt gave forth."¹¹  And parthenos usually does mean "virgin" in the Septuagint.  Brown again:  "most of the sixty-five LXX usages are clear references to virgins."⁸

But the Septuagint does not show that its translators expected a virgin birth.  Three facts limit what it proves.

1. Greek translators used parthenos loosely. In Genesis 34:2 Shechem seizes Jacob's daughter Dinah, "lay with her and humbled her." In the next verse the Greek calls her parthenos twice: "he loved the parthenos and spoke to the heart of the parthenos." The Hebrew there has na'arah, "girl."³¹ The translator of Genesis, who worked under Ptolemy II in the third century BC, earlier than the translator of Isaiah,³² used parthenos for a girl who by the story's own account was no longer a virgin. Brown makes the general point: "No more than bᵉtûlâ is parthenos so clinically exact that it necessarily means virgo intacta."⁸
2. They also used the ordinary word for "young woman." In Exodus 2:8 the Septuagint renders almah (Miriam) as neanis, "young woman."³¹ That is the word the later Jewish translators chose at Isaiah 7:14.
3. No one before Christianity drew a virgin birth from it. Brown: "There is no evidence that the presence of parthenos in the LXX gave rise in Alexandrian Jewry to an expectation of the virginal conception of the Messiah."⁸

In the second century AD three Jewish translators made new Greek versions closer to the Hebrew.  Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion all rendered Isaiah 7:14 with neanis, "young woman."³³  Irenaeus, writing about AD 180, names two of them as the source of the rival reading:  "Behold, a young woman shall conceive, and bring forth a son, as Theodotion the Ephesian has interpreted, and Aquila of Pontus."³³  Christians read these versions as anti-Christian corrections, and Otto Kaiser allows that they chose neanis "perhaps with the intention of thus preventing the church from giving a christological interpretation of the passage."¹⁴  But the Septuagint's own Exodus 2:8 shows that neanis for almah was already standard Jewish Greek before any Christian existed.

The fair summary is R. T. France's, an evangelical commentator on Matthew:  parthenos "is a reasonable, if not a necessary, translation."³⁴  Wildberger, a critic, calls it "not impossible from the outset."⁹  Walton:  "At best the LXX would indicate an interpretational preference rather than a linguistic necessity."¹³  It is one translator's reading of an ambiguous word, made six centuries after Isaiah.  It shows that one Alexandrian Jew saw a maiden in the verse.  It does not show that anyone expected a child without a father.

Part 3: How Jews read the verse, before and after Jesus

Before Jesus: silence

No Jewish text from before Christianity reads Isaiah 7:14 as messianic or as a virgin birth.  This is the decisive point for Test 3, and Christian scholars concede it.  Craig Blomberg, an evangelical New Testament scholar who defends Matthew's use of the verse, writes:  "Unfortunately, there are no demonstrably pre-Christian Jewish texts that reflect on the meaning of Isa. 7:14."³⁵  Raymond Brown adds that even later, "When expectations of the Messiah did develop and many OT passages were reinterpreted as references to him, Isa 7:14 was not applied messianically in Jewish usage."⁸  Alfred Edersheim, a convert from Judaism and a lifelong student of the rabbinic sources, compiled a list of 456 Old Testament passages "applied to the Messiah or to Messianic times in the most ancient Jewish writings."³⁶  Isaiah 7:14 is not on it.  Genesis 49:10 and Micah 5:2 are.

The Dead Sea Scrolls quote Isaiah 7 once, and the verse is 17, not 14.  The Damascus Document applies "days such as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah" to the split in Israel.³⁷  Searches of the scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, Philo and Josephus find no use of 7:14 before Christianity.³⁸

One text is sometimes offered as an exception.  In the Lives of the Prophets, a Jewish work probably of the first century AD that survives only in Christian copies, one manuscript says Jeremiah gave the Egyptian priests a sign that their idols would fall "[through a savior, a child born of a virgin, in a manger]."  Its translator, Douglas Hare, prints the words in brackets as the reading of a single manuscript, compares Luke 2:12, and warns that "It is virtually impossible to reconstruct the earliest form of this paragraph."³⁹  The manger is Luke's detail.  The bracketed words are evidence of a Christian copyist, not of a Jewish expectation.

The Targum: messianic at 9:6 and 11:1, not at 7:14

The Aramaic paraphrase of the Prophets, Targum Jonathan, is the best single test, because its translator was willing to add the word "Messiah" to the text.  At Isaiah 9:5 (9:6 in English) he calls the child "the Messiah whose peace shall be great upon us in his days."  At 11:1 he writes, "from his children's children the Messiah shall be anointed."  At 7:14 he adds nothing:  "Behold, a young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and she shall call His name Immanuel."⁴⁰  The Targum in its present form was edited after AD 70, so it is not itself evidence from before Jesus.  But it shows that the tradition which did read 9:6 and 11:1 of the Messiah did not read 7:14 that way, and so did not join the three passages.

The second century: Hezekiah

The earliest datable Jewish reading of 7:14 is the one Justin Martyr reports about AD 155–160, in his Dialogue with Trypho.  Trypho, a Jew, says:  "The Scripture has not, ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,’ but, ‘Behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son,’ and so on, as you quoted.  But the whole prophecy refers to Hezekiah, and it is proved that it was fulfilled in him".¹¹  Justin earlier addresses "you and your teachers," who "explain the prophecy as if [it referred] to Hezekiah, who was your king."¹¹  The Dialogue is Justin's own composition, so Trypho's words are Justin's report of the Jewish case.  It is a fair report:  the "young woman" reading matches the later Jewish Greek versions, and Trypho also mocks the virgin birth as a Greek fable, comparing it to Perseus "begotten of Danae, who was a virgin."¹¹

The Hezekiah reading fails on the Bible's numbers

The Hezekiah reading has its own problem, and it can be priced.  Second Kings says Ahaz reigned sixteen years, and his son Hezekiah was twenty-five when he succeeded him.²²  So Hezekiah was about nine years old when Ahaz became king, and was already born when Isaiah gave the sign during Ahaz's reign.  On either absolute date for Hezekiah's accession, 727 or 715 BC, he was born between six and eighteen years before the crisis of 734 BC.⁴¹

Christians and Jews both made this calculation.  Jerome, about AD 409, reports that "Hebraei hoc de Ezechia filio Achaz prophetari arbitrantur," the Hebrews think this was prophesied of Hezekiah son of Ahaz, and answers that when Ahaz began to reign "iam novem Ezechias esset annorum," Hezekiah was already nine years old.⁴²  Rashi, the most influential medieval Jewish commentator, made the same objection:  "Some interpret this as being said about Hezekiah, but it is impossible, because, when you count his years, you find that Hezekiah was born nine years before his father’s reign."¹²  Ibn Ezra a generation later:  "Many make the mistake of identifying Immanuel with Hezekiah; they cannot be the same, granting even this prophecy to have been uttered at the beginning of the reign of Ahaz; he reigned only sixteen years, and Hezekiah was at the death of Ahaz twenty-five years old."¹²

The critical commentator Joseph Blenkinsopp adds a caution.  He notes that "the entire biblical chronology for this period is confused and internally inconsistent," citing these very verses ("2 Kgs 16:2 cf. 18:2"), "with the result that a conclusion cannot be reached on chronological grounds alone either permitting or excluding identification of Immanuel with Hezekiah."⁴³  Otto Kaiser agrees that the chronology of the kings can be arranged so that "they present no objections to this identification."¹⁴  So the objection holds only as far as the numbers in Kings can be trusted.  It is still the objection the Bible's own text supplies, and the Jewish commentators who knew that text best accepted it.

The medieval Jewish readings

Rashi and Ibn Ezra did not need a virgin or a Messiah to explain the verse.  Both made the young woman Isaiah's wife, "the prophetess" of 8:3, and the child Isaiah's son.  Ibn Ezra:  "I think that Immanuel is the son of Isaiah, as well as Maher Shalal."¹²  Rashi:  "My wife will conceive this year.  This was the fourth year of Ahaz."¹²  David Kimhi and Isaac Abarbanel preferred Ahaz's wife, so that Immanuel would be a royal son.¹²¹²  Ibn Ezra opens his comment with the Christian reading and rejects it on the clock:  "It is to me a matter of surprise that there are those who say the prophet here refers to Jesus, since the sign was given to Ahaz, and Jesus was born many years afterwards".¹²

What the silence shows, and what it does not

Edersheim saw that the silence of the Jewish sources cuts two ways.  He cites the German scholar Steinmeyer's argument "that, since Is. vii. 14 was not interpreted by the ancient Synagogue in a Messianic sense, that passage could not have led to the origination of the legend" of a virgin birth, and asks:  "Whence did it originate?"³⁶  The point is sound as far as it goes.  The virgin-birth stories in Matthew and Luke are unlikely to have been invented to fit a verse that no one read as messianic.  Luke tells his version without quoting Isaiah at all, though France thinks Luke 1:31 "probably alludes to the same verse."³⁴  But that is an argument about where the story came from.  It concedes that Isaiah 7:14 fails Test 3 as a prediction.

Part 4: Who is Immanuel?

The text does not say

Isaiah 7 names neither the mother nor the child's father.  The definite article, "the young woman," suggests a particular woman known to the hearers, and most commentators read it that way.  Brevard Childs, the Yale scholar whose "canonical approach" reads each text within the finished book, admits that "The reader is simply not given information regarding the identity of the maiden."²⁶  Five answers have serious defenders.

The two most common modern readings are the royal one and Isaiah's son.  Wildberger argues for the royal one from Isaiah's own setting:  the sign answers a threat to the house of David, so "it is the unavoidable conclusion that Immanuel is the son of the king, and the almah is the wife or at least one of the wives of Ahaz."⁹  H. G. M. Williamson, the Oxford Hebraist, rejects the reading that makes Isaiah the father:  "The fact remains that the text itself contains no indication whatsoever either that the woman in question was the wife of the prophet, or that the child was to be his son — both of which could have easily been stated."⁴⁴  Against Isaiah's son also stands the article and the word:  the woman of 7:14 is "the young woman," while Isaiah's wife in 8:3 is "the prophetess."  Abarbanel made this point against Rashi in the fifteenth century.¹²

Walton offers a quieter answer:  the sign is the name, not the child.  "If the sign is the naming, the actual identity of the child in this time context would be insignificant.  It need not be a crown prince or anyone who is to play a later role, for the child himself is not the sign."¹³  Williamson agrees on that much:  "the sign element is predominantly to be sought in his name rather than in the circumstances of his birth".⁴⁴

The "Book of Immanuel": 8:8–10, 9:6–7 and 11:1

The case for a messianic child rests less on 7:14 than on what follows it.  Scholars often call Isaiah 7–12, or 6:1–9:7, the "Book of Immanuel."  The name returns twice in chapter 8.

1. 8:8. The Assyrian flood "will spread his wings out over your entire land, O Immanuel."² The land of Judah is called Immanuel's land. Motyer reads this as ownership: "Immanuel cannot be simply any child whatever."¹⁰ Walton replies in a footnote: "I simply do not see how this could be considered mandatory. America is my land, but I hardly own it or rule it."¹³
2. 8:10. The nations' plans "will be thwarted ... For God is with us!"² The Hebrew is immanu el, the name as a cry of confidence. Walton reads the three uses as a sequence: "the name Immanuel represents a glimmer of hope in 7:14, a cry of despair in 8:8, and a gloating claim by the enemy in 8:10."¹³
3. 9:6–7. "For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us. He shoulders responsibility and is called Wonderful Adviser, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." He "will rule on David’s throne and over David’s kingdom ... from this time forward and forevermore."² This child is royal, his reign has no end, and one of his names is "Mighty God."
4. 11:1. "A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots."² A new David will come from the stump of David's family.

If the child of 7:14 and the child of 9:6 are the same figure, the messianic reading of 9:6 carries back to 7:14.  Motyer argues exactly that:  "it is impossible to separate this Immanuel from the Davidic king whose birth delivers his people (9:4-7[3-6]) and whose complex name includes the designation Mighty God (9:6[5])."  His conclusion:  "Isaiah foresaw the birth of the divine son of David and also laid the foundation for the understanding of the unique nature of his birth."¹⁰

The critics divide on this link, and the division does not run along the expected line.  Williamson, a critical scholar, grants more than most:  "All this implies that Isaiah 7:14 has somewhat more of a ‘messianic’ flavour than most recent commentators have been prepared to allow."⁴⁴  Childs holds that the finished book itself makes Immanuel messianic:  by 8:8 "Immanuel is no longer the unborn child of 7:14, but the owner of Israel's land," and of the child of 9:6, "his role is messianic."²⁶  Kaiser goes furthest.  He takes Immanuel to be "the king of the time of salvation, the Messiah," and says "important arguments, which in my view are really decisive, can be advanced" for it.¹⁴  But Kaiser gets there by dating the passage after Isaiah, to the time after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC, so his Messiah is not a prediction made to Ahaz.  Walton, an evangelical, denies the link:  "I am unconvinced by the arguments of those who think that Isaiah is knowingly speaking of Immanuel in Isaiah 9".¹³

Three facts weigh against joining the passages as a prediction.  First, the Targum, which reads 9:6 and 11:1 of the Messiah, did not join them to 7:14, and no Jewish reader before or after Jesus did.  Second, the passage that does use the same clock, 8:3–4, gives it to Isaiah's son, conceived in the ordinary way, whose name is about Damascus and Samaria.  Third, the link does not touch the deadline.  7:16 still promises the end of the two kings within the boy's childhood, and Motyer concedes that Isaiah's hearers would have understood the birth as imminent.

So the link to 9:6 and 11:1 is the Christian reader's best ground.  It is a reading of the book as a whole, and careful scholars on both sides grant it some force.  It is not a reading anyone made of 7:14 before the event.

Part 5: The best defenders and critics, in their own words

Christian scholars who defend Matthew's use of Isaiah 7:14 fall into three camps.  The critics mostly agree with one another.

A direct prophecy seen in vision: Young and Motyer

Edward J. Young of Westminster Theological Seminary gave the classic form in 1954.  He argued that almah "was never used of a married woman," that the prophet saw the pregnant virgin "in vision," and that "In verse 14 the birth of the Messiah is present to the prophet’s vision.  This is prediction, and in the birth of Jesus Christ it found its fulfillment."  He did not hide the cost.  On the clock of verses 15–16 he wrote:  "It is perfectly true that verse 15 cannot, upon the interpretation which we have presented, be regarded as predictive prophecy."  He read the child's infancy as "a symbol of the short period of desolation at the time of Ahaz."¹⁶  On the Greek he held that the Septuagint's translators "naturally knew nothing of the virgin birth; they merely were seeking to translate the original correctly."¹⁶

Alec Motyer holds the same reading in a modern commentary, from the word (Part 2) and from the chain of royal children (Part 4).  He is candid about the clock.  "Within three years Damascus had fallen to Assyria, and thirteen years later Samaria was taken.  The implication, however, is that Immanuel’s birth is imminent, and surely Isaiah’s hearers would have understood it in this way".  The wider section, he says, "reveals a tension between the immediate and the remote," and "Isaiah does nothing to resolve this tension between immediacy and remoteness."¹⁰

This reading is coherent if prophets can see distant events and use a near event as a measure of time.  Its cost is that the verse becomes a prediction no hearer could have recognised as one.  Ahaz was given a sign he could not see, and the deadline measured by a child born seven centuries later.

A near sign with a further fulfilment: Oswalt, Blomberg, France

John Oswalt will not separate the child of 7:16 from the child of 7:14:  "The text gives every reason to believe that a single child is intended in all these verses."  He weighs the view that Isaiah expected the Messiah in his own day, and rejects it because "it requires a candid admission that Isaiah’s much-vaunted sign to Ahaz did not occur.  No such child was born, even though the two enemy nations did withdraw.  But the sign was surely twofold:  the birth of the child was to point to and to accompany the withdrawal."²³  His preferred answer is tentative:  "Perhaps the most attractive option is that Immanuel and Maher-shalal-hash-baz were one and the same," with the poem of 7:14 "pointing to the ultimate Immanuel."²³

Craig Blomberg calls this "double fulfillment":  "Matthew recognized that Isaiah’s son fulfilled the dimension of the prophecy that required a child to be born in the immediate future.  But the larger, eschatological context, especially of Isa. 9:1-7, depicted a son, never clearly distinguished from Isaiah’s, who would be a divine, messianic king."  He grants that "The majority of scholars deny any predictive element," and rests his case on providence:  "the ‘coincidence’ of Jesus being born of a virgin was too striking not to be divinely intended."³⁵  R. T. France takes the same line:  "The immediate historical reference is clear in vv. 14-17, but it is also clear from the wider context that the prophet's thought is, as often in Old Testament prophecy, not confined to that primary reference."³⁴

The fit seen afterward: Walton and Watts

John Walton gives up both the word and the messianic sense.  "Exegesis gives us no clue that Isaiah had been aware that he was speaking of the Messiah.  The child’s name merely expressed the hope that accompanied God’s deliverance."  For Walton the fulfilment is real but lies in the appropriateness of Isaiah's words to the later event:  "I think that even Matthew would have believed that Isaiah would be astounded at the way that his prophetic words were proving appropriate."¹³  He holds this while affirming the virgin birth and predictive prophecy in general.¹³

John D. W. Watts, in the Word Biblical Commentary, says much the same from a more critical stance.  "The translation ἡ παρθένος “the virgin” suits Matthew’s intention perfectly.  If one supposes a divine intention in this connection, part of God’s work was done through the Greek translator."  But "Only a part of the prophecy was literally fulfilled.  The Incarnate Son is named by divine command “Jesus,” not Immanuel.  And no effort is made to relate his childhood to fulfillment of the prophecy concerning Rezin and Pekah."¹

The critics

Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible commentary gives the standard critical reading.  He translates, "See, the young woman is pregnant and about to give birth to a son," takes the sign as "a reassurance that the royal Judean house will not be supplanted" and that the crisis will soon be over, and keeps Immanuel and Maher-shalal-hash-baz as two children, "the recto and verso of the same coin."  The Christian identification of Immanuel with Jesus, he writes, was "facilitated by the lxx he parthenos (understood as 'the virgin') and perpetuated through the Vulgate translation word virgo."⁴³  Raymond Brown:  "The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably Davidic, but naturally conceived, who would illustrate God’s providential care for his people."⁸  Wildberger lists the traditional Christian reading first among the proposals and grants that "In some quarters, it is still considered correct today, even if there are certain reservations and an awareness that Isaiah would have not been able to anticipate the specific way in which the prediction would be fulfilled."  He does not adopt it.⁹

Where they agree

Set side by side, the camps agree on more than their debates suggest.  All of them set the sign in Ahaz's crisis.  All of them grant that the deadline in 7:16 measured a short time in Ahaz's day:  Young makes the child's infancy a "symbol" of it, and Motyer says the hearers expected the birth soon.  None claims that anyone read 7:14 as messianic before Jesus.  They differ on one question:  whether God meant more by Isaiah's words than Isaiah's hearers could have seen.  That is a question about inspiration.  It is not one a historian can settle from the text, and it is not evidence a skeptic is obliged to weigh.

Part 6: What Matthew claims by "fulfil"

The formula

Matthew introduces Isaiah 7:14 with a formula he uses again and again:  "This all happened so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled."²  The Greek verb is plēroō, "to fill" or "to fulfil."  It occurs sixteen times in Matthew.  Twelve of those refer to Scripture or "the prophet."  Ten introduce a quotation, and two, at Jesus's arrest, appeal to "the scriptures" in general.⁴⁵  The other four show the verb's ordinary range.  A net is "full" (13:48).  The Pharisees are told to "fill up" the measure of their fathers (23:32).  Jesus comes "to fulfil all righteousness" (3:15).  And he comes not to abolish the Law and the Prophets "but to fulfill them" (5:17).²  None of these four is about a prediction coming true.  They are about something being filled to its full measure.

The standard lexicon of New Testament Greek files Matthew's formulas under "the fulfilment of divine predictions or promises," and lists 1:22 together with 2:15 and 2:17.⁴⁶  So the word alone does not decide whether Matthew means "predicted and now happened."  The lexicon's own list puts Hosea's memory of the exodus and Jeremiah's lament in the same box as Isaiah 7:14.  The way to find out is to see what kinds of texts he says were "fulfilled."

Two texts in the same chapter that are not predictions

Matthew 2 uses the same formula twice more, within a few verses of 1:22.

Hosea 11:1 at Matthew 2:15.  The holy family stays in Egypt "until Herod died.  In this way what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet was fulfilled:  'I called my Son out of Egypt.'"²  In Hosea the verse reads:  "When Israel was a young man, I loved him like a son, and I summoned my son out of Egypt.  But the more I summoned them, the farther they departed from me."²  It is a memory of the exodus, in the past tense, about the nation of Israel.  The evangelical commentators agree.  France:  "Hosea’s words are not a prediction, but an account of Israel’s origin.  Matthew’s quotation thus depends for its validity on the recognition of Jesus as the true Israel, a typological theme found elsewhere in the New Testament".³⁴  Walter Kaiser, who holds that a text means what its human author intended:  "it was not a prophecy as was Micah 5:2."⁴⁷  Blomberg:  "Hosea 11:1 is a reference to the exodus, pure and simple."³⁵

Jeremiah 31:15 at Matthew 2:17–18.  After Herod kills the boys of Bethlehem, Matthew writes:  "Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:  'A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud wailing, Rachel weeping for her children'".²  In Jeremiah the voice is Rachel, mother of Joseph and Benjamin, mourning her descendants carried into exile, and the next verse tells her to stop crying, because "Your children will return from the land of the enemy."²  Blomberg again:  "The text in Jeremiah is not a prediction, nor does it even use the future tense."³⁵  Matthew's link is a place and a person:  Genesis buries Rachel "on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem)," so the ancestral mother weeps again near her grave.²

In both cases Matthew says a text was "fulfilled" that its own author did not write as a forecast.  Blomberg calls Matthew's use of Hosea "a classic example of pure typology," and adds:  "The original event need not have been intentionally viewed as forward-looking by the OT author".³⁵  France defines typology as "the recognition of a correspondence between New and Old Testament events, based on a conviction of the unchanging character of the principles of God's working."³⁴  Kaiser, for Hosea:  "This is biblical typology at its best".⁴⁷

There is a defence of a stronger sense for Hosea.  G. K. Beale argues that Hosea himself expected a new exodus, so that "what Matthew sees was already something seen to some degree by Hosea himself."⁴⁸  Even on Beale's reading, Hosea foresaw a new exodus of the nation, not a child brought back from Egypt.

What follows for Isaiah 7:14

If Matthew can say that Hosea 11:1 and Jeremiah 31:15 were "fulfilled," then "fulfilled" in Matthew does not carry the claim "this text predicted this event."  It carries the claim that an event in Jesus's life completes a pattern or fills out the meaning of an earlier word of God to Israel.  Matthew 1:22–23 is the first of these formula quotations, and nothing in its wording sets it apart from the others.  The most natural reading is that Matthew uses Isaiah 7:14 the same way.  A sign of "God with us" given at a birth in Ahaz's day reaches its full measure in a birth that Matthew believes really was God with us.

One detail of Matthew's wording supports this.  Where the formula introduces a death, Matthew changes it.  At 1:22 and 2:15 he writes hina plērōthē, "so that it might be fulfilled," as if the event served the purpose of the text.  At 2:17, the massacre of the children, and at 27:9, Judas's blood money, he writes tote eplērōthē, "then it was fulfilled."⁴⁵  Raymond Brown reads the change the same way:  "Probably this reflects Matthew’s reluctance to attribute to God an evil purpose: that He would have brought about the death of the children in order to fulfill a prophecy."⁸  A writer that careful about what his formula implies is not using it loosely.  He is using it for correspondences, and choosing his grammar to say what kind.

Walton's account of Matthew fits this.  He thinks "even Matthew would have believed that Isaiah would be astounded at the way that his prophetic words were proving appropriate."¹³  Watts:  Matthew "finds in the LXX rendition of 7:14 a coincidental convergence of this sentence in Scripture with the events he is recounting and interprets it as prophecy and fulfillment."¹  France makes the point from the shape of Matthew's chapter:  "vv. 22-23, where Isaiah 7:14 is introduced, are clearly an explanatory addition to the narrative, which would flow smoothly from v. 21 to v. 24 without these verses, and not the inspiration for it."³⁴

Is Matthew making a predictive claim at all?

Probably not, in the sense a modern apologist means.  Matthew does not say that Isaiah foresaw a virgin birth, or that the verse could only fit Jesus.  He says the birth happened so that the word spoken through the prophet would be filled to the full.  That is a claim about the meaning of events, made by a believer to believers who already shared his view of Scripture.  It can be wrong only if the events did not happen or the correspondence is not real.  It cannot be scored as a hit in a test of foreknowledge.

That is good news for Matthew and bad news for the apologetic use of the verse.  Matthew is not caught in a mistranslation, because he does not rest his story on the verse.  But a modern writer who offers Isaiah 7:14 as a prediction whose fulfilment proves the Bible's foreknowledge is making a claim Matthew does not make, and must meet the tests a prediction has to meet.

Part 7: The verse scored

The eight tests

The tests are those of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy.  "Pass" and "Fail" are for a reader who does not already accept the Gospels' authority.  The claim tested is the apologetic one:  that Isaiah 7:14 predicted the virgin birth of Jesus.

The two decisive tests are 2 and 3.  The verse does not say what the apologetic claim needs it to say, and no one read it that way until after the event it is said to predict.

What a conservative reader keeps

1. The Septuagint's "virgin" is Jewish and pre-Christian. Matthew did not invent it, and the charge that Christians altered the Greek is false. Counter-missionary writers who say otherwise are wrong.
2. The virgin-birth story did not come from the verse. No Jew expected a virgin birth from Isaiah 7:14, Luke tells the story without the verse, and Matthew's quotation reads as a comment added to a story he already had. Steinmeyer's old question still stands: if not from Isaiah, where did the story come from? That is argued in The Nativity Accounts.
3. The word almah fits a virgin, though it does not require one. In most of its uses the woman is unmarried, and in Israel an unmarried girl would normally be a virgin. Isaiah's word does not rule Matthew's reading out.
4. The royal child of Isaiah 7–11 is a real theme. The child of 9:6–7 is called "Mighty God" and reigns forever. Critical scholars such as Williamson and Childs grant that the finished book gives Immanuel a messianic colour. A Christian who reads Isaiah 7–11 as one movement toward a divine son of David holds a serious position.
5. Matthew is not caught in an error. His "fulfil" claims a correspondence, as it does for Hosea and Jeremiah, not a forecast.

What a conservative reader gives up

1. Isaiah 7:14 as proof of foreknowledge. It cannot be offered to a skeptic as a prediction of the virgin birth. It fails Tests 2 and 3, and the leading conservative commentators concede the facts that make it fail.
2. "Almah means virgin." It does not. It means a young woman of marriageable age, and the case for "virgin" is a case about what such a woman would usually be, not about what the word says.
3. "The sign had to be a miracle." Isaiah's other signs are ordinary events with a meaning attached, and the matching sign in chapter 8 is an ordinary birth.
4. A single, distant fulfilment. Every serious defender, from Young to Blomberg, has to account for the deadline in 7:16 by treating the near events as a symbol, a first fulfilment, or a type. The verse cannot be read as being about Jesus alone.

Objections and responses

"Almah is never used of a married woman, so the mother in Isaiah 7:14 was a virgin."  This is the main conservative argument, from Young, Motyer and Oswalt.  Part 2 weighs it.  The premise is nearly true of the biblical uses, though Proverbs 30:19 is doubtful and the Ugaritic cognate is used of a royal bride.  The conclusion does not follow.  Even if the mother was an unmarried virgin when Isaiah spoke, nothing in the verse says she conceived without a man, and Motyer himself says the hearers would have understood "that some girl, at present an ‘almâ, would marry and in due course bear Immanuel."¹⁰

"An ordinary birth is no sign.  The Lord promised a sign, so the birth must be miraculous."  Justin made this argument in the second century:  "why did God say that He would give a sign which is not common to all the first-born sons?"¹¹  It has real force, because Isaiah did give miraculous signs:  to the sick Hezekiah he offered the shadow going back on the stairway (38:7–8).²  But Isaiah's signs are just as often ordinary events with a meaning attached.  He walked barefoot for three years "as an object lesson and omen pertaining to Egypt and Cush" (20:3), and the sign to Hezekiah in the Assyrian siege was a farming calendar:  "This year you will eat what grows wild" (37:30).²  He says of himself and his sons, "I and the sons whom the LORD has given me are reminders and object lessons in Israel" (8:18).²  Ahaz was offered a miracle, "You can even ask for something miraculous" (7:11), and refused.  The sign he was given instead was a name and a deadline.

"The sign was given to the whole house of David, not to Ahaz alone, so it can reach far beyond his lifetime."  Young notes that the "you" of 7:14 is plural:  "The plural stands in sharp contradistinction to the [singular] of verse 11.  The offered sign was to have been for Ahaz’s own benefit; the imposed sign is not even offered specifically to the king."¹⁶  Motyer adds that "The failure of the house of David is wider than Ahaz."¹⁰  This is a fair point about the audience.  It does not remove the deadline.  Verse 16 still ties the child's early years to "the land whose two kings you fear," and that land was desolate within Ahaz's reign.

"The Septuagint's translators were Jews before Christ, and they wrote 'virgin.'"  They did, and this is a real point:  the "virgin" reading is not a Christian invention.  But the Septuagint also calls Dinah parthenos after she had been seized and "humbled," and renders almah as neanis in Exodus 2:8.  The word in Isaiah 7:14 shows that one translator saw a maiden there.  It does not show that anyone expected a child without a father, and Brown and Tsevat both find no such expectation in Alexandrian Judaism.

"The Jews changed 'virgin' to 'young woman' to answer the Christians."  Justin made this charge, and Tregelles repeated it.  But neanis for almah is already in the Septuagint at Exodus 2:8, two or three centuries before Christianity, and the Aramaic Targum has "young woman" at 7:14 too.  The later Jewish Greek versions chose the ordinary rendering.

"Isaiah 7:14 has a double fulfilment:  a child in Ahaz's day, and Jesus."  This is Blomberg's and France's position, and it is coherent as theology.  It is not evidence of foreknowledge, and its defenders do not claim it is.  Blomberg rests it on providence, the "coincidence" being "too striking not to be divinely intended."³⁵  That argument assumes what the skeptic doubts:  that the virgin birth happened.  Test 3 then applies:  no one read the verse this way before the event.

"'God with us' means the child is divine, and that can only be Jesus."  The name is a sentence, "God is with us," like many Hebrew names that say something about God:  Elijah means "my God is the LORD."  The same chapter uses the phrase as a cry of confidence, "For God is with us!" (8:10), and Walton reads the name as "a glimmer of hope" in a crisis.¹³  A child named "God is with us" is a sign that God is with his people, not a claim that the child is God.  The Christian reading of the name depends on joining 7:14 to the "Mighty God" of 9:6, which Part 4 weighs.

"Jesus was never called Immanuel, so the prophecy failed."  This skeptical objection is weaker than it looks.  Matthew changes "you will call" to "they will call," and he treats Immanuel as a description of who Jesus is, not as a birth name.  Isaiah's own children carried names that were messages, not everyday names.  The objection does show, as Watts says, that "Only a part of the prophecy was literally fulfilled."¹  It does not show that Matthew misunderstood his own claim.

"The virgin birth story was invented from a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14."  This skeptical theory is weak.  No Jew before Christianity read Isaiah 7:14 as messianic or as a virgin birth, so there was no expectation for a storyteller to fulfil.  Luke tells the virginal conception without quoting Isaiah at all, and Matthew's quotation reads as an explanation added to a story he already had.  France:  the verses "are clearly an explanatory addition to the narrative ... and not the inspiration for it."³⁴  Where the story did come from is a question for The Nativity Accounts.

"Testing the verse as a prediction is anachronistic.  Matthew used it as a fulfilment in a deeper sense."  For Matthew this is fair, and Part 6 agrees.  The tests do not judge Matthew.  They judge the modern apologetic claim, made in books such as Josh McDowell's, that this verse is a prediction whose fulfilment proves foreknowledge.  A text offered as proof must meet the standard of proof.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Gordon Wenham's 1972 study of betulah ("Betulah: A Girl of Marriageable Age," Vetus Testamentum 22) and Cyrus Gordon's 1953 note on almah (Journal of Bible and Religion 21) were not read. Both are cited often on each side of the word debate.
2. Williamson's commentary on Isaiah 6–12 in the International Critical Commentary (2018) was not reached. His later view may differ from his 1998 chapter quoted here.
3. The date of Pekah's death. Tiglath-pileser's text is broken at the verb, "[I/they] killed Peqah," and the editors date the change of king to 731 BC. Second Kings says Hoshea assassinated him. The deadline of 7:16 is met on any reading of the break.
4. Whether the Babylonian Chronicle's "Šamara'in" is Samaria was long debated. Grayson follows Tadmor in reading it so. Sargon's claim to have taken Samaria does not depend on it.
5. Tsevat counts 51 occurrences of betulah; the tagged Leningrad text gives 50. The difference is not explained.
6. Whether the virginal conception happened is a historical question this article does not try to settle. The verdict here is only that Isaiah 7:14 cannot be evidence for it.

Verdict

Isaiah 7:14 promised King Ahaz a sign that ran out within a few years.  A young woman would bear a son, and before he was old enough to choose good and refuse evil, the two kings Ahaz feared would be gone.  Assyria removed both of them by 731 BC.  The Hebrew word for the mother means a young woman of marriageable age, who would usually be unmarried, and it says nothing about how her son was conceived.  The Greek "virgin" that Matthew quotes is a real, pre-Christian Jewish translation, but it raised no Jewish expectation of a virgin birth, and no Jewish reader before or after Jesus took the verse as messianic.  As a prediction of the virgin birth, the verse fails Tests 2 and 3 and carries no weight.

That verdict costs Matthew less than it costs his modern defenders.  Matthew says the same thing of Hosea's exodus and Jeremiah's exile, which no one thinks were forecasts.  His "fulfil" claims a pattern completed, and the pattern he sees, a sign of "God with us" at a royal birth, belongs to a book that goes on to promise a child called "Mighty God" on David's throne.  A Christian may hold that reading as part of faith.  A skeptic is not obliged to accept it as evidence, and an apologist should not offer it as one.

Sources