THE QUESTION:

Should Bibles speak of a “virgin” birth in Isaiah 7:14?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No less than 38 U.S. orchestras featured Handel’s “Messiah” in annual Christmas concerts during the 2015-16 season, making it “the runaway most-performed work,” according to a Baltimore Symphony survey. The beloved 1741 oratorio about Jesus Christ is also perhaps the most-performed piece across all of musical history — if we exclude “Happy Birthday to You.”

In this COVID Christmas, audiences must make do without live performances, but they may recall Handel’s setting for one of the Bible’s most-debated verses: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,” from Isaiah 7:14. This Old Testament verse is quoted in the New Testament’s Matthew 1:23 as foretelling Jesus’s birth to the Virgin Mary.

In Isaiah’s account, the Southern Kingdom of Judah based in Jerusalem faced military peril from an alliance the rival Northern Kingdom of Israel forged with Syria. Through the prophet Isaiah, God reassured Judah’s faithless King Ahaz that the kingdom of David would survive, giving the “sign” that the woman’s newborn son would be named Immanuel, meaning “God is with us.”

Verse 16 then proclaims that before this boy would be old enough to tell right from wrong, Judah’s enemies would fall. That indicates the prophecy applied literally or symbolically to a birth in Isaiah’s own time, possibly the prophet’s own son although Scripture never specifies who it was. In Christians’ “double meaning” interpretation, this prophecy applied both to Isaiah’s day and the coming of Jesus Christ seven centuries later.

(In addition to Matthew, the separate New Testament tradition in Luke 1:26-35 also reports that Jesus was born of a virgin, without quoting Isaiah.)

However, is “virgin” the right translation of the Hebrew word almah in Isaiah 7:14?