Parthenos doesn’t necessarily always mean “virgin.” It’s similar to the word “maid” or”maiden” in English. A young, unmarried woman, who by implication is usually assumed to be a virgin, but not by strict definition. Thayer’s also says the word can sometimes refer to a newly married woman or a bride, and can also refer to a “man who has never had commerce with a woman.” The original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 says almah (“young woman”) which the LXX translates as parthenos. There is another Hebrew word, bethula, which specifically means “virgin.” The almah in Isaiah 7:14 is not said or implied to be a virgin (the text just says, “Behold. The young woman is with child…”[present tense. The woman is already pregnant. It is not likely that the LXX translator intended to imply a virgin birth. The word parthenos, as was pointed out, can also mean a newly married young woman, and a newly married young woman can be expected to get pregnant. There is no commentary or evidence indicating that anyone took this passage as claiming a virgin birth before GMat, (or that anyone took it as referring to the Messiah), so that interpretation seems to have originated with Matthew. Why he chose to do this is unknown. There was no pre-Christian expectation in Jewish tradition that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. In fact, strictly speaking, the Jewish Messiah has to have a human father, because he is supposed to be a direct, patrilineal descendant of David. So why did Matthew infer such a tradition? Who knows, but I am intrigued by the hypothesis espoused by R. Joseph Hoffman that Matthew may have been trying to combat early accusations that Jesus was illegitimate in some way. Hoffman relies largely on the Toldedot Yeshu, which claims that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier. Hoffman is not claiming the TY is necessarily history, but presents it only as evidence that people were making accusations. The accusations don’t have to be true for the theory to work. The accusations are not necessarily false either, though. Setting cultural prejudice aside, there is no historical problem with a woman conceiving a child out of wedlock or getting raped.
- There’s no evidence any early Jew saw this as a prophecy about the Messiah, or a virginal conception.
- Hebrew term ‘almah’ refers to a young woman, not virgin.
Matthew uses the Greek text
Since he used a Greek text, he was dependent on a faulty translation.
Isaiah’s prediction is about his own immediate future: he expects the boy to be born within the next year or so. Jewish interpretation of this prophecy understood it to have been fulfilled in the birth of Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, the king to whom the prophecy was ad dressed. This interpretation is attested by Justin, to his chagrin, in Dialogue with Trypho 67:1. Contemporary Jewish tradition did not understand Isa 7:14 to be a prophecy about the messiah. Brown, Birth of the Messiah, 147n42: “Isa 7:14 was not applied messianically in Jewish usage. A list of 456 such ‘messianic passages’ is given in Edersheim, Life, II 710–41; and Isa 7:14 is not among them. Knowing this, Justin, already in the second century, was accusing . . . Jewish scholars of tampering with OT evidence pertinent to the Messiah (Dialogue lxxi–lxxiii).”
Is there a virgin in Isaiah 7:14? (Prof. Miller)
The Hebrew text ofIsa 7:14 refers simply to “the young woman” (almah). The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible for hellenistic Jews, translates the Hebrew almah with the Greek word parthenos, which also means “young woman”. The Hebrew text clearly has nothing to do with virginity. There is no rea son to think that the Septuagint does, either. Certainly no Jewish source takes Isa 7:14, in any language, to refer to a virgin. But parthenos can mean “virgin” and it’s possible-though unlikely-that Matthew saw that meaning in the Greek version of Isaiah’s prophecy (see pp. 203-4). Nevertheless, “the parthenos/virgin will conceive and will have a son” does not describe a virginal conception. Even if we take parthenos to mean “virgin,” Septuagint Isa 7:14, understood in its nor mal sense-apart from Christian theological concerns that were read into this passage centuries after it was written-means only that a woman who is now a virgin will become pregnant. No miracle is intended. (Every woman who gets pregnant was once a virgin.) The key to the meaning here lies in the tense of the verb “be pregnant.” The Hebrew language does not have different verb forms for future and present; that has to be determined from context. But Greek does distinguish these tenses and in the Septuagint the verb is future. A miracle would be in view if the text said that the virgin has conceived or is pregnant. In Isa 7:14, in both Hebrew and Greek, the divine sign is the timing of the con ception, not its manner. Christianity has misunderstood Isa 7: 14 because it has interpreted this prophecy from the perspective of the traditional Christian understanding of Matt 1:23.
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