Popping the Balloon
Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, a [a]virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel. Isaiah 7:14 NASB
Virgin – Italy is a young nation. In fact, it’s much younger than the United States, becoming a unified nation on March 17, 1861. Before that date, Italy was really a large collection of smaller regional or city states under the long arm of the Church. What this means is that Italy is local, even today. Dialects spoken in the South are incomprehensible to people in the North. Cuisine differs from region to region. Local laws have no uniformity across the country. Business is conducted according to ancient protocols. Even ancestry has vast differences depending on geography (for example, Sicily is more Greek than Italian, and the people there might be offended if you called them “Italian” instead of “Sicilian). But there is one unifying factor, something you will find in nearly every village and town in Italy. The Virgin Mary! The unity of Italy is its adoration of the Virgin and the Virgin’s connection between God and the people. In actual fact, Jesus takes a backseat to Mary.
Much of the argument for Mary’s status rides on her fulfillment of prophecies concerning the birth of the Savior. And that brings us to Isaiah. Joel Hoffman’s investigation of the famous passage in Isaiah 7:14 is definitely worth reading.[1] He demonstrates that cultural differences are critically important in understanding the Hebrew words alma, b’tulah, and na’arah—all words that describe certain characteristics of young women in Israel. alma, of course, is the crucial word in this Isaiah passage, translated “virgin.” You will notice that even the NASB includes a footnote stating that the translation might be “maiden,” not “virgin.” Hoffman concludes: “In the end, then, we learn from Exodus 2:8 that our best guess for alma is some kind of young woman, perhaps with connotations of politeness or loftiness, but with no reference to virginity.”[2] And again, “But one thing is clear. We have no evidence to suggest that alma means ‘virgin’ and lots of evidence to suggest that it does not.”[3]
So how did we get the nearly universal translation of alma as “virgin” in this crucial Messianic prophecy? The answer is “a mistake in the LXX.” The translators of the LXX were not very good when it comes to unusual words, and alma is one of those words. So they opted for a theological construct in a word-for-word (that is, non-cultural) translation and turned alma into the Greek parthenos, and of course, Christian theologians and translators jumped on this Greek word to proclaim the Messianic prophecy of the “virgin” birth.[4] The problem, of course, is that the translation is theological, not cultural. Hoffman concludes:
So Isaiah 7:14 reads, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. A pregnant woman will give birth to a son, and call him Immanuel.” . . . At first glance one might wonder—and people have wondered, vocally and vehemently—what kind of sign “a pregnant woman” giving birth might be. After all, they (wrongly) argue, only a “virgin” giving birth would be worthy of “sign”-ship. . . They are completely wrong, and they have missed the entire point. The sign here is a reminder that extraordinary things can come out of the ordinary. That is Isaiah’s point. If a virgin gave birth, we would hardly need the text to tell us how amazing that was. Surely we would know it on our own. But, Isaiah is apparently concerned, some people might forget that signs come from daily events, too; that Immanuel can come from a perfectly plain woman of childbearing age; that life itself can be miraculous. When we look carefully at Isaiah, we see the sign in plain sight and we know that God is with us.[5]
But what about Italy? Do you think that Hoffman’s scholarly analysis of alma means that all those churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary will now be abandoned and torn down? Not a chance! Do you think people will stop praying to the Virgin? No way! The culture determines the stature of Mary, not the Bible or the Hebrew text. Mary is here to stay. She might not be “Queen of the Universe” in Protestant circles, but she is still the “Virgin.” Try taking that out of Christianity and see what happens. You might discover that the virgin birth is more important than God’s grace. After all, God’s grace is also Jewish. The virgin birth isn’t.
Topical Index: Mary, virgin, alma, Isaiah 7:14
[1] Joel Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), chapter 8, pp. 195-224.
[2] Ibid., p. 209.
[3] Ibid., p. 211.
[4] Hoffman writes, “But in the crucial case of Isaiah 7:14, apparently, they couldn’t resist mucking with the translation to make it mean what they wanted it to for theological reasons. They wanted Isaiah to prophesy the birth of Christ” (p. 218). I find this remark perplexing since the LXX was translated by Jews and they had no theological reason to force the text into a Messianic prophecy. Later Christian interpretation as a Messianic prophecy makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense to put this on Jews in the 2nd Century B.C.E.
[5] Ibid., p. 224.
