Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Biblical Exegesis: Isaiah 7:14

Photo of the Book of Isaiah page of the BibleImage via Wikipedia
This time let's consider Isaiah 7:14 which says:

"Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel."

I was driven to write this post because I was challenged by TheGodless on Twitter who said:

If you believe in the virgin birth, you are saying things the Bible doesn't say. Practice what you preach.
I was very amused. Of course the Bible teaches that Jesus was born of a virgin. I'm sure that TheGodless assumes that I just blindly believe everything without doing any research to see if I can stand on it or not.
I'm sure he heard the rhetoric that the word "almah" translated from Hebrew here does not mean "The Virgin" but should be "young woman". Some people who have this view have attempted to suggest that Christians changed the texts in translation to say that the young woman is a virgin. The thing is the Greek Translation (the Septuagint) made a couple of hundred years before Christ renders that word "Virgin". The translators of the Septuagint were not Christians. They were Jewish Rabbis who I would argue knew Hebrew better than the people trying to say "almah" does not mean virgin in this verse. Also don't forget that the word translated "sign" in the same verse is used never to refer to ordinary events or circumstances - it's understood to refer to the miraculous! A young woman given birth would never be referred to as a "sign". But if the woman was a virgin then of course that would be a sign.

Therefore the only logical conclusion is that the text is saying that a child would be born of a virgin -  a miraculous birth. There are a lot of pagan myths and legends where important men/gods are "born of virgins" but even if you grant them not one of them was a true virgin birth as describes in Matthew and Luke. I've written on several of these legends and I find they were not true virgin births because the women may had been virgin before the conceiving but after the act of conceiving I would not call them virgins anymore. Something penetrated them. In Alexander the Great's case it was a Snake. In many of other cases women were tricked or raped by a god. In Jesus's case there was no sex before the conception or before Jesus' birth! That is what I would define as a virgin birth.



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1 comment:

  1. Exactly. It's patently obvious that the 2nd century BC scribes thought the word should be rendered as. It was thought that this was a miraculous sign to come, and that is why they translated it with the Greek word for virgin. This is clearly the prophet Isaiah recognizing the birth of Jesus by a virgin. Why should this surprise anyone? Isaiah makes several prophesies that were fulfilled by Christ.

    Good post.

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