Isaiah 7:14 is a verse in the seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah in which the prophet Isaiah, addressing king Ahazof Judah, promises the king that God will destroy his enemies; as a sign that his oracle is a true one, Isaiah says that a specific almah has conceived and will bear a son whose name will be Immanuel, "God is with us", and that the threat from the enemy kings will be ended before the child is weaned. The author of the gospel of Matthew used it to suggest that Jesus was born to a parthenos, a virgin.
Historical context
In the mid-8th century BCE the Kingdom of Israel and its ally Aram-Damascus besieged Jerusalem to force king Ahaz of Judah into joining a coalition against the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the aggressive "great power" to the northeast. Ahaz turned to Assyria itself for help and the Assyrians destroyed Syria and Ephraim and Judah became an Assyrian vassal state. In the late 8th centuryHezekiah, the son and successor of Ahaz, eventually rebelled, thinking that with Egyptian help he could regain Judah's independence, but Egyptian aid was not forthcoming. Jerusalem was put under siege again, and Hezekiah was able to save himself only by paying tribute. By the late 7th century Assyria fell to a new "great power", the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and in 586 BCE Judah was conquered by the Babylonians and part of its population deported to Mesopotamia. The forced exile lasted only a few decades, however, for in 539 Babylon in turn was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire and the exiles were allowed to return to Jerusalem.
Biblical text
Prelude Isaiah 7:110
is faced with invasion by its northern neighbours, the Kingdom of Israel and Aram-Damascus, but God instructs the prophet Isaiah to tell king Ahaz that God will destroy Judah's enemies :
The prophecy Isaiah 7:1116
Isaiah delivers God's message to Ahaz and tells him to ask for a sign to confirm that this is a true prophecy. Ahaz refuses, saying he will not test God. Isaiah replies that Ahaz will have a sign whether he asks for it or not, and the sign will be the birth of a child, and the child's mother will call it Immanuel, meaning "God-with-us" ; by the time the infant "learns to reject the bad and choose the good" he will be eating curds and honey, and Ephraim and Syria will be destroyed :
Aftermath – Isaiah 7:17–25
follows, with a further prophecy that at some unspecified future date God will call up Assyria against Judah: "The Lord will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as have not been seen since Ephraim broke away from Judahthe king of Assyria". Verses describe the devastation that will result: "In that day every place where there used to be a thousand vines... will be turned over to thorns and briars". The "curds and honey" reappear, but this time the image is no longer associated with Immanuel: "In that day a man will save alive a young cow and two sheep, and there will be such an abundance of milk, he will eat curds and honey".
Interpretation
The Book of Isaiah
Chapters 139 of the Book of Isaiah are made up of a number of smaller units from a variety of times. Isaiah 7:18:15 apparently dates from the beginning of the reign of Hezekiah, during the lifetime of Isaiah, and its purpose was to persuade Hezekiah not to join an alliance in rebellion against Assyria. A century later, in the time of Josiah, the prophecy was revised to present Ahaz as the faithless king who rejected God's promise of protection for Jerusalem and the house of David, with the result that God brought Assyria to devastate keka the land until a new and faithful king would arise to restore peace. Isaiah promises Ahaz that God will destroy his enemies and tells him to ask God for a sign that this is a true prophecy. A sign, in this context, means a special event which confirms the prophet's words. Ahaz's sign will be the birth of a son to an almah. The word almah has no exact equivalent in English: it probably meant a young girl or woman who had not yet borne a child. So the sign is that:
A young girl will conceive and give birth to a son;
She is to name the boy Immanuel, meaning God is with us ; and
God will destroy Ahaz's enemies before the child is able to tell right from wrong.
The almah has been identified as either the mother of Hezekiah or the daughter of Isaiah. There are, however, problems with both candidates: Hezekiah was born well before the war with Ephraim and Syria began, and although almah does not specifically mean virgin, it probably does mean a girl who has not yet had a child, and Isaiah already has a son. In any case the significance of the Immanuel sign is not the identity of the child and its mother but the meaning of the name and, most important, the role it plays in identifying the length of time before God will destroy the Ephraimite-Syrian coalition.
The book of Isaiah was the most popular of all the prophetic books among the earliest Christiansit accounts for more than half the allusions and quotations in the New Testament and over half the quotations attributed to Jesus himself, and the Gospel of Matthew in particular presents Jesus's ministry as largely the fulfillment of prophecies from Isaiah. In the time of Jesus, however, the Jews of Palestine no longer spoke Hebrew, and Isaiah had to be translated into Greek and Aramaic, the two commonly used languages. In the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 the wordalmah meant a young woman of childbearing age who had not yet given birth; however the Greek translation, the Septuagint, rendered it as parthenos, a word which can mean virgin or maiden. This gave the author of Matthew the opportunity to interpret Jesus as the fulfilment of the Immanuel prophecy: Jesus becomes God is with us, the divine representative on earth, and Matthew further identifies Jesus with the Immanuel born to a parthenos by asserting that Joseph did not have sexual intercourse with Mary before she gave birth.
When the Revised Standard Version translators rendered "almah" as "young woman" in 1952 it immediately for conservative Christians, who believed that this passage predicted the virgin birth of Jesus. The RSV quickly replaced the KJV in many churches across America, but fundamentalist American Christians argued that nowhere in the Old Testament was an almah anything other than a young unmarried girl, and one pastor publicly burned a copy of the RSV. Isaiah 7:14 became a litmus test of orthodoxy among conservatives, but most modern Bible translations use "young woman". The original meaning of the word parthenos in the Septuagint is "young woman", not "virgin", but the word changed meaning over the centuries; thus the authors of Matthew and Luke believed instead that Isaiah would predict a virgin birth for the coming Messiah, so they endorsed their choice by quoting the Greek translation.
