Justified True Belief

(P1) The Hebrew word of Isaiah 7:14, 'almah, does not by itself mean virgin. + Christians stand accused of turning an ordinary young woman into a virgin so that Isaiah would fit Jesus, and the accusation opens with a fact. Isaiah wrote 'almah, and 'almah is not the Hebrew word for a virgin. (1) 'Almah names a young woman of marriageable age. - Here is the line the whole quarrel is about, as the English Standard Version prints it: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:14) Where that English reads "virgin," Isaiah's Hebrew has 'almah. - The noun turns up seven times in the Hebrew Bible, and the company it keeps is worth seeing: Rebekah coming out to the spring with a jar on her shoulder (Genesis 24:43), Miriam standing in the reeds watching her baby brother (Exodus 2:8), women with tambourines in a temple procession (Psalm 68:25), the girls of a love song (Song of Solomon 1:3, 6:8), a proverb about the way of a man with a girl (Proverbs 30:19), and Isaiah 7:14. - Every one of them is young enough to be unmarried, and not one of them is clearly a married woman. Still, all that tells us is who the word gets used for. It is not the same thing as a definition. - Think of the English word "teenager." It tells you roughly how old somebody is. It tells you nothing whatever about whether she has ever been kissed, and a lawyer who tried to build a case on it would be laughed out of the room. (2) Betulah, the word offered in its place, is not a technical term either. - The next move in the charge is to name the word Isaiah should have used. Betulah is what English Bibles usually render "virgin," so if a virgin is what he meant, why not simply write that? - Because betulah will not hold still either. Whether it means a virgin all by itself, or only a girl of a certain age, is something specialists have argued out in the journals for fifty years without settling it. Two verses show why. - Joel tells Judah to mourn "like a virgin wearing sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth" (Joel 1:8), and the word behind "bridegroom" there is the ordinary Hebrew for a husband. A girl with a husband is not what English means by "virgin." - Genesis, wanting no doubt at all about Rebekah, calls her "a maiden whom no man had known" (Genesis 24:16). That second clause is doing real work in the sentence, and nobody tacks it on to a word that has already settled the question. (3) Modern translators go both ways with the same word. - The English Standard Version prints "virgin" for 'almah at six of its seven appearances. That includes a proverb about things too wonderful to understand (Proverbs 30:19) and a love song where no doctrine at all is at stake (Song of Solomon 6:8). At Exodus 2:8 it prints "girl." - Several other respected Bibles print "young woman" at Isaiah 7:14, which happens to be the one appearance that does carry a doctrine. - A reader with two translations on one shelf can watch this happen without knowing a word of Hebrew. It is not a scandal. It is what happens when a word covers a stretch of ground rather than marking one spot on it. Therefore, whatever settles Isaiah 7:14, it is not the dictionary.

(P2) Jewish translators put the Greek word for virgin into Isaiah 7:14 in the second century BC. + The narrower word, the one that does point at a virgin, entered this verse in Greek. The men who put it there were Jews at work long before Jesus was born. (1) Greek-speaking Jews made themselves a Bible they could read. - By the third century BC the Jewish communities outside Israel were large and Greek-speaking, and their children could no longer follow a Hebrew scroll. So the Scriptures were translated for them, in Alexandria in Egypt above all. That translation is the Septuagint, named for the tradition that seventy or so scholars produced the first part of it, and it was the Bible most Jews around the Mediterranean used. - The Law came first. The Prophets, Isaiah among them, followed in the second century BC, with the Greek Isaiah somewhere near the middle of it. - There is a dated receipt for that, and it turns up in an unlikely place. A man in Egypt, translating his grandfather's book of wisdom into Greek, opens with a preface making excuses for himself: he arrived, he says, in the thirty-eighth year of King Euergetes, which lands in 132 BC. - In the middle of the excuses he mentions that the Law, the Prophecies and the rest of the books already read differently in Greek than in the original. He meant to complain about how hard his job was. Without meaning to, he told us that the Prophets, Isaiah's own shelf, were in Greek in his lifetime. • The Greek Isaiah can also be dated from the inside: at Isaiah 23 its translator turns the Hebrew "ships of Tarshish" into ships of Carthage, the way a man in Hellenistic Egypt would name the far end of his own sea. (2) At Isaiah 7:14 those translators wrote parthenos. - Parthenos is the ordinary Greek word for a girl who has not been with a man. It is the word behind the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess in Athens. - They did not use it every time. Follow all seven Hebrew appearances into Greek and four come out as neanis, the plain word for a young woman: Miriam in the reeds, the girls with tambourines, the girls of the love song twice. At Proverbs 30:19 the Greek drops the girl from the sentence and reads "in youth." - That leaves two places for parthenos. One is Genesis 24:43, where Abraham's servant waits at a spring for the girl who will be Isaac's wife. The other is Isaiah 7:14. The narrower word was a choice, and the usual rendering was sitting right there. • Genesis is not a clean parallel: there the context had already ruled out any man (Genesis 24:16), so the narrower word had a prompt. Isaiah 7:14 gives no such prompt, and the translator reached past his default anyway. (3) Nobody in Alexandria was working for Matthew. - Those men were Jewish scholars in Egypt, at work a century and a half before Jesus was born, translating for Jewish congregations, with no Christian anywhere in the world to please. - Think of a will drafted forty years before the family fell out over it. Whatever it says, it was not written to win an argument that had not started yet, and everybody in the room knows it. - What that settles is who chose the word, not whether they chose well. Honest scholars argue the choice was loose. What no one can argue is that Christians made it. Therefore, the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14 is a Jewish rendering, made in Greek, long before there was a church.

(C1) Therefore, Christians did not put "virgin" into Isaiah 7:14. + The word was in the verse before there was a Christian alive to put it there. The reasoning is deductive, which means the premises work like links in a chain: if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out. A link holds when it is more plausible than its denial, which is a good deal less than proof beyond all doubt. (1) The dates rule out the culprit the charge names. - "Christians mistranslated the verse" is a claim about who did something and when. (P2) dates the doing to Alexandria, in the second century BC, in Jewish hands. - If Christians had produced the wording, the wording could not be older than Christians. It is older than Christians. So they did not produce it. • Logicians call that shape modus tollens: if a claim were true, something else would follow; that something is false; so the claim is false. It is the shape of every alibi ever offered. If he did it, he was in the house. He was in Manchester. So he did not do it. (2) What the dates do not settle. - Not that the Greek translators were right. A pre-Christian choice can still be a poor one. - Not that Isaiah himself had a virgin conception in view, and not that the Alexandrian translator did either. The Hebrew is left exactly where (P1) found it, and a girl who is a virgin when the prophet speaks and conceives by her husband the next year satisfies the Greek sentence too. - Not that a virgin conceived. That is a historical claim about a first-century woman, and no argument about a Hebrew noun could ever reach it. (3) What falls is the accusation. - The word "mistranslation" carries a charge of manufacture, and manufacture is what the dates rule out. - What is left standing when the accusation goes is a translation choice: an open Hebrew word (P1) given a narrow Greek one by men with nothing at stake in the question (P2). That is a choice to argue about, not a forgery to expose. - The question that survives is the one worth having, and it is a question about Isaiah rather than about Alexandria: could this sign ever have been used up inside one king's lifetime (P3, P4)?

(P3) Isaiah announced the sign to the house of David, not to Ahaz alone. + Two armies were on the road to Jerusalem when the sign was given. Who exactly it was given to is a matter of Hebrew grammar, and the grammar is not ambiguous. (1) The crisis was aimed at David's dynasty. - The date is about 735 BC. Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel came up against Jerusalem to force King Ahaz of Judah into their alliance against Assyria, and "the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind" (Isaiah 7:2). - Their war aim is quoted in the chapter itself: "Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it" (Isaiah 7:6). They meant to pull David's line off the throne and install their own man. - This is a coup, not a border raid. When a takeover is aimed at replacing the whole board, the threat is to the firm, not to whoever happens to be sitting in the chair that week. - What the coup threatened, then, was an old promise. Generations earlier God had sworn to David that "your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me" (2 Samuel 7:16). Knock the dynasty over and the oath goes down with it, which is why the answer has to be addressed to the house rather than to the man. • None of this turns on who wrote the book. Scholars who divide Isaiah among several authors writing across two centuries or more still put chapters 7 through 11 in the eighth century BC, and so does the traditional view that the prophet wrote every word of it. Either way these chapters are old, and the whole book survives in a single scroll from the Dead Sea caves copied around 125 BC, more than a century before Jesus was born. (2) Ahaz turned down the sign he was offered. - "Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven." (Isaiah 7:11) • Sheol is the Hebrew word for the place of the dead, thought of as lying far down under the earth. The offer runs from the bottom of the world to the top of the sky: name anything you like. - Ahaz answers with a piece of piety: "I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test." (Isaiah 7:12) It sounds humble. It is not. - He had already sent messengers to the king of Assyria saying "I am your servant and your son. Come up and rescue me" (2 Kings 16:7). He had picked his rescuer, and he did not want a second opinion. (3) The grammar changes the moment he refuses. - "And he said, Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:13-14) - Hebrew marks the difference between one "you" and more than one. Standard English lost that distinction; the American South kept it in "y'all." In verse 11, "ask a sign" is singular, and Isaiah is speaking to the king. In verses 13 and 14 the "you" goes plural, and the new addressee is named outright: the house of David. • Then it changes back. At verse 16, where a deadline is set for the war Ahaz was living through, "the land whose two kings you dread" is singular again, and so is the warning about Assyria in verse 17. The plural covers the sign; the singular covers the news Ahaz needed that year. Two addressees, three verses apart, and the Hebrew keeps them apart. - A letter that opens "Dear Mr. Ahaz" and then switches to "Dear shareholders" has changed who it is written to, and the change is in the ink rather than in the reader's imagination. Therefore, the sign is announced over the head of the king who refused it, to the dynasty he was holding in trust.

(P4) Isaiah keeps the same child in view for four more chapters. + The child announced in chapter 7 does not leave the book at the end of it. He is named again, then given a throne, then given a name that no ordinary boy has ever had to carry. (1) The name comes back over the land itself. - Assyria floods into Judah "reaching even to the neck, and its outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel" (Isaiah 8:8). The country is addressed as if it belonged to the child, and a land is not usually spoken to as somebody's property unless he is its king. - Two verses on, the name is flung at the plotting nations as a taunt: "Take counsel together, but it will come to nothing; speak a word, but it will not stand, for God is with us." (Isaiah 8:10) In Hebrew, "God is with us" is the two words the child's name is made of, immanu and el. (2) The boy born in chapter 8 is a different child. - Isaiah's wife bears a son with a deadline of his own attached: "before the boy knows how to cry My father or My mother, the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria will be carried away before the king of Assyria" (Isaiah 8:4). Damascus fell in 732 BC and Samaria in 722 BC, so that clock ran out on time. - Two boys, two mothers, two deadlines, a few verses apart, and only one of them is named Immanuel. Isaiah was already a married man with a son old enough to walk out to the king's waterworks beside him (Isaiah 7:3). Whatever else his wife was, she was not an unmarried girl. - Some readers do fold the two boys into one. But the text spends four verses giving the second one his own mother, his own witnesses and his own timetable, which is a strange amount of trouble to take over a child already announced. (3) Chapter 9 gives the child a throne and a name. - "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6) - "Mighty God" is not a courtesy title borrowed from court flattery. Isaiah uses that exact Hebrew pair one chapter later of God himself: "A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God." (Isaiah 10:21) - And the reign has no exit: "Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore." (Isaiah 9:7) Kings die. This one does not stop. (4) Chapter 11 has him growing out of a cut stump. - "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit." (Isaiah 11:1) Jesse was David's father, and a stump means the tree has been cut down. The dynasty two kings marched on Jerusalem to fell is pictured felled, and sprouting anyway. - Where he ends up is nowhere an eighth-century birth could reach: a wolf lying down with a lamb, a child with his hand over a snake's den, and the nations of the world coming to ask after him. - "In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious." (Isaiah 11:10) (5) Jewish readers who rejected Jesus still read these chapters as messianic. - When Hebrew stopped being the language of the street, synagogues began reading an Aramaic paraphrase alongside the Scripture so that ordinary people could follow. That paraphrase is called the Targum, and it does not translate quietly: where it thinks a passage is about the Messiah, the anointed king Israel was waiting for, it says so in the text. - At Isaiah 9:6 it names the Messiah outright as the child in whose days peace will increase. At Isaiah 11:1 it has a king coming out from the sons of Jesse and an anointed one rising from his sons' sons. The Targum also moves the divine titles of 9:6 onto God, who does the naming, which is the opposite of a scribe helping a Christian case along. - Those paraphrases were written down after Christianity began, and there is no point hiding it. The late date is also what makes them worth having. The scribes who produced them had heard the Christian claim and turned it down, so nobody in that room had the slightest motive to help it along. Therefore, the child of chapter 7 grows across four chapters into a figure no eighth-century birth could exhaust.

(P5) Matthew quotes the Greek Isaiah his readers already owned. + Matthew's own sentences show a man reaching for a text his readers had on the shelf, rather than a man building one to order. (1) He quotes the Greek Bible and explains its Hebrew name. - "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)." (Matthew 1:22-23) - The little explanation in the parentheses is the tell. A writer inventing a link has no reason to explain a Hebrew name to the people he is inventing it for. He explains it because he expects readers who know their Bible in Greek and do not know Hebrew, which is exactly the audience the Greek Isaiah was made for (P2). - One word does differ. The Hebrew has "she shall call," the Greek has "you shall call," and Matthew has "they shall call." Swapping who does the calling is the sort of small adjustment first-century writers made routinely when they quoted. The word actually under dispute, parthenos, is not his at all: it is the Greek Bible's own. • The naming verb was moving around in Jewish copies before any Christian touched it. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, written about 125 BC, has a third-person form here rather than "she shall call." Matthew's "they" is at the loose end of a range that Jewish scribes were already working in. (2) The New Testament's virgin birth does not come out of Isaiah 7:14. - Luke tells the same event at greater length and cites no prophecy at all in the annunciation, Isaiah 7:14 included. What he gives instead is Mary's question to the angel: "How will this be, since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34) • Gabriel's promise of David's throne does echo the old dynastic oath (Luke 1:32-33), which is the same promise the sign in Isaiah 7 was defending (P3). An echo is not a citation, and Luke never turns it into one. - Two accounts, one citing the verse and one not. If the verse had generated the story, the writer who tells that story at the greatest length is a strange one to have left the verse out. - Even scholarship that denies Isaiah predicted anything of the kind holds that belief in a virgin conception was circulating before Matthew wrote, and that his quotation followed the belief rather than produced it. (3) The word was not Matthew's to choose. - He wrote in Greek for readers who read their Scriptures in Greek, and he quoted the wording those readers would find when they went and looked (P2). - Quoting the edition on your reader's shelf is what an honest writer does. Slipping in a different one because it suited him better would have been the suspicious act, and it is the act he stands accused of. Therefore, Matthew received the wording rather than selecting it.

(C2) Therefore, Matthew neither chose the wording nor stretched the sign past Ahaz's lifetime. + Both halves of the mistranslation charge require Christian hands on the text, and neither one gets them. (1) Where each half was actually settled. - The wording was settled in Alexandria by Jewish translators in the second century BC (P2). - How far the sign reached was settled by Isaiah, who addressed it to a dynasty rather than to a king (P3) and then spent four chapters growing the child past anything one lifetime could hold (P4). - Matthew took both as he found them (P5). (2) Christians divide over whether the sign also landed in Ahaz's own day. - One reading takes Isaiah 7:14 as direct prediction: the far child is the only child in the verse, and the near sign for Ahaz's crisis is the boy born in chapter 8 with his own deadline. - The other is the two-horizon reading: a child in Ahaz's own generation was the first installment, and the wording kept reaching past him. A first installment is a real payment that does not close the account, the way handing over a deposit does not mean the car is paid for. - Each reading has serious defenders. On either one the sign was never sealed shut in the eighth century BC, and on either one the wording still came from Jewish hands long before Matthew. (3) What would defeat this. - Evidence that neanis stood in the Greek before Christianity, or that parthenos replaced it afterwards, would take (P2) apart. That is a real vulnerability. No copy of Greek Isaiah survives from before the Christian era, so the second-century BC date is an inference drawn from dated Jewish witnesses rather than a reading off a manuscript. • As things stand, the neanis readings that do exist at this verse all belong to named revisers of the second century AD, and there is no trace of the word here before them. - A demonstration that the address in verses 13 and 14 is singular after all would take (P3) apart. The plural forms are there for anyone to check in an interlinear Bible, the kind that prints the Hebrew line with the English word for word underneath. None of this proves that a virgin conceived. What it shows is that the verse Matthew quoted read the way he said it read, in words the Jewish world had put there first, about a child its own prophet would not let go of. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Were the Messianic Prophecies Written Before Jesus? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Does the New Testament Quote the Old Testament Out of Context?