But also, In How to Read the Bible, Kugel suggests that the child may be a mere hypothetical:
To begin with, it is unclear whether the first word of Isa. 7:14 is to be translated as “Behold,” “Look,” and the like, or (as I have done) “Suppose . . .” The latter is indeed sometimes a meaning of the Hebrew hinneh (for example, in Exod. 3:13, “Suppose I do go to the Israelites . . .”) and would seem to fit the context better, since in those preamniocentesis days one would probably not say, “Behold! This woman is pregnant and is going to give birth to a son.”* The next word, ha-‘almah, translated as “a certain young woman,” might also be rendered simply as “the young woman.” . . . Biblical Hebrew sometimes also uses definite articles and even demonstratives in an indefinite sense**, in the same way that an English speaker might say, “This guy came up to me and started talking French,” where “this guy” really means “an undefined person, someone I never met before.”
True, a prophet might know in advance that the child would be a boy, but why would he say “Behold!” unless he were talking to another prophet?

“Samuel took the [not mentioned previously] cruse of oil . . .” (1 Sam. 10:1); “This lowly man called out and the LORD heard him . . .” (Ps. 34:7)

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).”

What does virgin even mean? (Prof. Miller)

Greek
The Greek word in Matthew and Luke is parthenos (7rape~vos). In classical Greek it meant a mature young woman, either married or unmarried. Classical authors could use it to refer to a young wife or a young widow. In the Greek Old Testament parthenos has a range of meaning. It often means “young woman,” with nothing more spe cific implied. In some contexts it has the connotation of being unmarried. In a few places, the woman’s virginity is important to the sense of the passage for example, in the law that priests can marry only women who are virgins (Lev 21:13-14)-but that has to be inferred from the context. In those rare passages which specifically draw attention to the woman’s virginity, parthenos is qualified with an added phrase: “a parthenos who has not known a man,” using the well-known biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse (as in Gen 24: 16 and Judg 21: 12). In one passage where virgins are clearly meant, the sense is conveyed by the phrase “uncorrupted girls” (korasia aphthora), 1 with out using the word parthenos (Esther 2:2). As in other Greek literature, parthenos in the Septuagint did not by itself connote what we mean by virgin ity. In one passage, this term refers to a rape victim after she has been attacked (Gen 34:3). In another, the term refers to a young widow. Our literary data show that in the centuries in which the Septuagint and the New Testament were produced, the normal sense of parthenos was a young woman of childbearing age who had not yet had a child. In Isa 7:14 LXX, then, the clear connotation of “the parthenos will conceive and give birth to a son” is that this will be her first child. A woman is a parthenos during her time of transition to full fertility. What completes her transition is having her first child.

She stops being a parthenos, in other words, after having a baby, not after having intercourse. That is why the second-century bishop, Ignatius of Antioch, can refer to certain parthenous (a plural form of parthenos) in the con gregation who qualifY as widows:2 they are young women who have lost their husbands and have no children.

Hebrew
In the Hebrew Bible the relevant words are betulah (:1″U’1:1) and almah (:11:J”V). Neither word means virgin, though betulah occurs in contexts where virginity is included in the sense of the passage (as in Lev 21:13-14, mentioned above). It is also the word that is modified by “who has not known a man” when the woman’s virginity is emphasized. Betulah usually means a young, never-mar ried woman, although it is the word for the grieving widow in Joel 1 :8. Almah occurs only nine times in the Hebrew Bible. It means a young woman old enough for marriage, but by itself does not connote whether or not she is actually married. English translations render it “young woman” or “girl,” except at Isa 7:14, where Christian doctrinal concerns override linguis tic accuracy in some English Bibles (see p. 95).

## 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.

This led older English Bibles (e.g., the King James Version) mistakenly to render the Isaiah verse with the word “virgin” so that it would match Matthew’s wording. When in 1952 the Revised Standard Version properly translated Isa 7: 14 with “young woman,” many Christians were surprised and misinterpreted this correction to be a denial ofJesus’ virgin birth. Some fundamentalists were so upset that they sponsored public burnings of the RSV. The official Catholic translation, the New American Bible, uses “virgin” in Isa 7:14 because bishops overruled the Catholic scholars and demanded that it be mistranslated.