The virgin birth mistranslates almah

Almah appears only a few times in the Hebrew Bible. It describes Rebekah at the well (Genesis 24:43), Moses’ sister Miriam as a girl (Exodus 2:8), young women playing timbrels in a procession (Psalm 68:26; 68:25 in Christian Bibles), and maidens in the Song of Songs (1:3; 6:8). Proverbs 30:19 speaks of “the way of a man with an almah,” a verse some read as describing a sexual relationship. In these uses the word denotes a young woman, usually unmarried. No verse uses it of a woman who is certainly married, and none states that the woman is a virgin.

Betulah is not as technical as it is sometimes made to sound. When Genesis introduces Rebekah as a betulah, it adds that no man had known her (Genesis 24:16), as if the word needed help. Joel pictures a betulah mourning for the husband of her youth (Joel 1:8). Biblical Hebrew had no single word that meant “virgin” and nothing else.

So the word almah neither proves virginity nor rules it out. A Christian who claims that Isaiah’s word choice proves a virgin birth is claiming too much. A Jewish reader who says the word excludes it is also claiming more than the word can bear. The question has to be decided on other grounds.

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made by Jews, mostly in Alexandria, over the last three centuries before Jesus. Its translator of Isaiah, working probably in the second century BC, rendered almah in 7:14 with parthenos, the usual Greek word for a virgin. That was a Jewish reading of a Jewish text, made generations before Christianity existed. Matthew did not invent it. He quoted the Bible that Greek-speaking Jews already read.

Parthenos can be used loosely, though: the Septuagint uses it of Dinah in Genesis 34:3 after Shechem had taken her. The translator’s choice shows that some Jews read Isaiah 7:14 in a way compatible with “virgin.” It does not prove what Isaiah meant.

Once Christians began to cite the verse, Jewish translators of the second century, Aquila among them, produced new Greek versions that rendered almah as neanis, “young woman.” That was a fair choice, and it shows the verse quickly became a point of dispute. It also shows that the earlier Greek rendering was not a Christian forgery.

A Christian reading that denies Isaiah 7:14 any meaning in Ahaz’s day is wrong. The sign is tied to Ahaz’s crisis: before the child is grown, the threat will pass (7:16). Most likely a child was born in that generation whose growth marked the time.

Isaiah, though, does not drop Immanuel after chapter 7. In 8:8 the flood of Assyria sweeps into Judah and fills the land of Immanuel, as if the land belonged to him. Two verses later the prophet defies the nations because God is with us (8:10), which is what the name means. Then comes the child of chapter 9 (9:5-6; 9:6-7 in Christian Bibles): a son given, with authority on his shoulder, ruling on David’s throne with peace that has no end. Christian translations render his names as titles, “Mighty God, Everlasting Father.” The Jewish Publication Society translation renders them as a single sentence-name that praises God, like the names Isaiah gave his own sons, and many Jewish commentators identify the child with Hezekiah. Both readings are possible, and the Christian rendering is contested. Two chapters later Isaiah describes a shoot from the stump of Jesse on whom the spirit of the LORD rests (11:1-10), a passage Jewish tradition has long read of the Messiah.

Matthew reads the first sign in light of where Isaiah takes it: a child bound up with God being with his people, who becomes the hope of an endless reign on David’s throne. Whether that way of reading is fair is a larger question, taken up in the New Testament misuses the Hebrew Bible.

Christians do not believe in the virgin birth because of Isaiah 7:14. They believe it because two Gospels, Matthew and Luke, report it. The two accounts tell the story from different sides, Matthew through Joseph and Luke through Mary, and share little beyond the central claim that Jesus was conceived without a human father. In Luke, Mary herself asks the angel how this can be, “since I am a virgin” (Luke 1:34). Mark and Paul do not mention the virgin birth.

Matthew cites Isaiah 7:14 as a fulfillment that fits the story he tells. He does not offer it as the reason to believe the story. No prophecy could prove a miracle of this kind, and Christians should stop arguing as though one could.

The virgin birth is a claim about a miracle, and most people who accept it do so because they have first come to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. If he was not, there is little reason to accept an account of his birth. If he was, a remarkable birth is a smaller thing to believe. That leaves almah as a real translation question, not the foundation of the Christian faith.