FHJC Isaiah Resources - Isaiah 7; A virgin birth?

In the book of Matthew, one of the 1st-century accounts of the life and times of Jesus, the miraculous nature of Jesus's birth is of paramount importance. Here are a few verses from Matthew 1:

Matthew 1:18 Now the birth of Jesus the messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 1:22-23: All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet (Isaiah 7): "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel!"

The Crossway Study Bible commentary (a Christian publication) states the following:

The word translated virgin refers specifically to a "maiden" - that is, a young woman who is unmarried and has not had a sexual relationship with anyone. Thus Matthew rightly applied this prophecy to the virgin birth of Christ. This prophecy also had significance for Isaiah's day. Ahaz and his house stood judged by God for unbelief. The passage gave hope to faithful believers like Isaiah for a future Messiah. The sign finds its final fulfillment in the virgin birth of Jesus, who is literally "God with us".

Similarly, in the later account in the book of Luke:

Luke 1:30-31, 34-35: [Gabriel] the angel said to her [Mary], "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive inyour womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus... Mary said to the angel, "How an this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her "The holy spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therfore the child to be born will be holy.

But the term in Hebrew is "almah." Does it really mean "virgin?" Let's take a look at its other appearances in the TaNaKh, with this question in mind: If we could translate the whole verse except for this word; what translation might we intuitively come up with? Virgin? Young woman? Something else?

And for comparison, here are the two cases where the term occurs in its masculine form:

The Septuagint

The 3rd century Greek translation of Israelite and Judean literature

Isaiah 14: διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον· ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ·

Wikipedia's Summary

The modern scholarly consensus is that the tradition rests on very slender historical foundations. In the entire Christian corpus the virgin birth is found only in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke: both are probably from the period AD 80-100, both are anonymous (the attributions to Matthew and Luke were added in the 2nd century), and it is almost certain that neither was the work of an eyewitness. Matthew and Luke did not find their story in Mark, nor did one of them derive it from the other, nor did they find it in a common source. Raymond E. Brown suggested in 1973 that Joseph was the source of Matthew's account and Mary of Luke's, but modern scholars consider this "highly unlikely", given that the story emerged so late. It follows that the two narratives were created by the two writers, drawing on ideas in circulation in some Christian circles perhaps by around 65 AD.

Matthew uses Isaiah 7:14 to support his narrative, but scholars agree that the Hebrew word used in Isaiah, "almah", signifies a girl of childbearing age without reference to virginity, and was aimed at Isaiah's own immediate circumstances. Paul does not mention it and assume Jesus's full humanity, Mark, the earliest gospel, seems unaware that there was anything exceptional about the birth, and in the Gospel of John Jesus has both father and mother (he is "the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know" (John 4:21-22), repeating Philip's words to Nathanael at John 1:45, "We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth").

---- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth_of_Jesus#Arguments_and_evidence

Here's an interesting thought published by Samuel N. Deinard in The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures back in 1899 (!!!!)

What, then is the "oth" Isaiah here offers? Nothing else than that "The child to which the young woman (a person well known to his hearers) is soon to give birth will be a son." ... When this prediction concerning the birth of a son proves true, then, the prophet adds, the young woman will confidently call him Emmanu-el, for the people will be convinced that the former prediction, לא תקום ולא תהיה, will also prove true.

---from Notes on Isaiah, Chapt. 7, page 167

Why is Ugarit so important?

Check out this brief, incredibly informative explanation by Michael Heiser, What's Ugarit Got to do with Anything? https://www.logos.com/ugaritic

Here are some highlights:

You might be thinking that all you really need to know about the religion of the Israelites is in the Bible. You’d only be partially correct in that thought. We are centuries removed from the world of the Bible, and a lot of material in the Bible is pretty obtuse to those of us in the 21st century. Those who wrote the Bible weren’t writing for a technological society, and so words, phrases, descriptions, and concepts that were completely familiar to an Israelite are lost on us. There’s also the matter of the kinds of ideas that were floating around in Israel from other religions—like Baal worship—that were being embraced by people who were supposed to be following the God of Israel. You have to wonder why, to paraphrase Elijah (1 Kings 18:21), Israel kept halting between two opinions as to who was the true God.

Ugaritic, the language of ancient Ugarit (in modern Syria), isn’t something that most people think about when it comes to Bible study. However, the clay tablets discovered and deciphered in the late 1920s and early 1930s provide an unparalleled glimpse into the life and religious worldview of the ancient Israelites. Some (including myself) would argue that they are as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ugaritic is important because of the fact that its vocabulary is so close to biblical Hebrew — many Ugaritic words are letter-for-letter the same as biblical Hebrew. It is the religion of Ugarit, however, that is especially important to Old Testament scholarship.

With that, how can Ugarit help us with our almah question?

Here is an incredible passage from the aptly titled A Solution to the Immanuel Prophecy in Isaiah 7, published in Journal of Biblical Literature, 1972, page 449-456: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3263678?seq=7#metadata_info_tab_contents

The evidence from Ugarit has been rightly adduced to ascertain the meaning of 'almah, but thus far a crucial element from that evidence has escaped proper evaluation. In the three places where glmt, the exact equivalent to 'a1zmah, is used, it refers to a young woman being sought in marriage. Two of the three instances are found in the Keret epic, where Keret was pursuing Hurriya, the daughter of King Pebel, as a prospective wife (line 204). The second time gZmt occurs describing Hurriya is at her wedding in text 128, II, 22: "The girl thou causest to enter thy court / will bear thee seven sons.''1l In the story of Nikkal and the Kathirat, the moon god Yarih pays the bride- price for the goddess Nikkal; but before the marriage negotiations, however, we find our closest parallel to Isa 7:14: "a virg[in] will give birth . . . Lo a maid will bear a son.''l2 The Ugaritic words tld bt1/[t] and hl g1zmt tld b[n] resemble 7:14 in several respects, obviously providing us with the same sort of announce- ment. As Gray has shown, the prediction that the bride would bear offspring was fittingly made in this "stock formula" at marriage.l3 In Hebrew 'almah also appears where marriage is imminent. Rebekah is called 'al7nah in Gen 24:43, just prior to becoming Isaac's wife. Her family sent her away with the hope that she would become "the mother of thousands of ten thousands." (vs. 60). Prov 30:19, which speaks of "the way of a man with a maiden" might refer to "the bride who has just been brought home,''14 or to a young man eager to secure a particular girl as his wife. If 'aImah refers to a girl soon to be married, and if the announcement of Isa 7:14 is characteristically given close to one's marriage, where is Isaiah's marriage to this young woman described? The solution seems to lie in 8:1-4... We will return to this point after we make some progress in chapter 8. But there are two other passages from his conclusion that I want to share:

The "marriage" solution to the relationship between chs. 7 and 8 clarifies two vigorously debated points about 7:16x. One is the meaning of 'almogh. It must mean "virgin," as Ugaritic text 77 has proved by its parallelism of glmt and btlt, equivalents to Hebrew "young woman" and "virgin."42 The woman is not mar- ried, for the wedding does not take place until 8:1-3. This does not mean, how- ever, that the mother was a virgin at childbirth...

And finally, his closing point:

Matthew's use of this passage in the NT is consistent with his references to other OT verses. On occasion he employs a secondary interpretation which dif- fered considerably from the primary message. In Matt 2: 15 Jesus' stay in Egypt fulfilled Hos 11: 1, "Out of Egypt have I called my son," a verse referring to the exodus. Similarly Matt 2:18, describing the agony over Herod's murder of young boys in Bethlehem, cites Jer 31:15, where Rachel wept over her children in Ramah. This mourning is related to the captivity of Israel44 and is illustrative of the intense suffering brought on by Herod's act. Jeremiah's prophecy received a "new fulfilment" through Herod's atrocity.45 In an analogous manner Matthew selected Isa 7:14 to describe the birth of Jesus. The language was perfectly suited to Matthew's purpose; and where he went beyond the normal interpretation, he clearly explained the circumstances.

The RSV Controversy

When the Revised Standard Version translators rendered "almah" as "young woman" in 1952 it immediately became a center of controversy for conservative Christians, who believed that this passage predicted the virgin birth of Jesus. The RSV quickly replaced the KJV in many churches across America, but fundamentalist American Christians argued that nowhere in the Old Testament was an almah anything other than a young unmarried girl, and one pastor publicly burned a copy of the RSV. Isaiah 7:14 became a litmus test of orthodoxy among conservatives,but most modern Bible translations use "young woman".

The original meaning of the word parthenos in the Septuagint (i.e., the Hebrew Bible translated by Hellenistic Jews in Koine Greek) is "young woman", not "virgin", but the word changed meaning over the centuries;^[1] thus the authors of Matthew and Luke believed instead that Isaiah would predict a virgin birth for the coming Messiah, so they endorsed their choice by quoting the Greek translation.

^---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_7:14