Isaiah 7:14: virgin, young woman, or both?

What the verse is doing in 735 BCE

Ahaz, king of Judah, is being squeezed. Rezin of Aram (Syria) and Pekah of Israel have allied against him and plan to install a puppet on his throne. Isaiah meets him at the aqueduct of the upper pool, with his own son Shear-jashub (name: 'a remnant shall return') in tow, and tells him not to fear the two smoking firebrands to the north. God then offers Ahaz a sign of his choice, as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven. Ahaz refuses, citing Deuteronomy 6:16 about not testing God. The refusal is pious cover. He has already decided to call in Tiglath-Pileser III for help (2 Kings 16:7-8).

God gives the sign anyway. The Hebrew of verse 14 reads: 'Behold, the almah is pregnant and bearing a son, and she shall call his name Immanuel (God-with-us).' The next verses set the horizon. Before the child knows to refuse evil and choose good, the land of the two kings Ahaz dreads will be deserted. The sign is timed against the Syro-Ephraimite coalition. The child's name preaches the message: God is with Judah whether or not the king trusts that he is.

Three more 'Immanuel' references follow inside Isaiah 7-9. Isaiah 8:8 addresses the Assyrian invasion to 'your land, O Immanuel.' Isaiah 8:10 says foreign plans will not stand 'because God is with us' (immanu el). Isaiah 9:6 announces a child born whose name will be 'Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.' Whether those four texts describe one figure, two figures, or a thematic chain is part of what each position has to answer.

The Hebrew vocabulary: almah and betulah

Hebrew has two relevant nouns. Almah is used nine times in the Hebrew Bible. It refers to a young woman of marriageable age. In context the women named almah are unmarried (Rebekah at the well in Genesis 24:43, Miriam watching the basket in Exodus 2:8, the maidens of Song of Songs 1:3 and 6:8). Virginity is the cultural default for an unmarried young woman, but the word itself names the life-stage, not the sexual status. Betulah is the more technical term, used 51 times. It also can mean 'young woman' in some contexts, but it is the word that gets explicit virginity glosses (Genesis 24:16 says of Rebekah: 'a betulah, neither had any man known her,' as if betulah alone did not settle it). Both words shade toward each other. Neither is a perfect lexical match for the English 'virgin.'

The Septuagint translators, working in Alexandria around the third and second centuries BCE, rendered almah in Isaiah 7:14 with parthenos. Parthenos in classical Greek does center on virginity, though it can be used loosely. The Septuagint elsewhere renders almah with neanis ('young woman') in Exodus 2:8 and parthenos in Genesis 24:43. The Isaiah 7:14 choice is therefore not the only possible Greek rendering. Why the Alexandrian translators went with parthenos here is one of the positions below.

Jerome, translating into Latin around 400 CE, used virgo. By that point the Christian reading was firmly attached to the verse, and the Latin word carries the narrower 'virgin' meaning into the Vulgate. The English chain (Wycliffe, Tyndale, KJV) inherits virgo as 'virgin.' Modern committee translations split. The RSV (1952) used 'young woman,' provoking the famous mid-century controversy that led the NIV and ESV to retain 'virgin.' The NRSV uses 'young woman' with a footnote. The CSB uses 'virgin' with a footnote. The Jewish Publication Society (JPS Tanakh) uses 'young woman.'

The translation chain, link by link

What Justin and Trypho already had on the table

The debate over Isaiah 7:14 is not modern. It is on the record in the second century CE. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, written around 160 CE, stages an extended conversation between a Christian (Justin) and a learned Jew (Trypho) over Isaiah 7:14. Trypho argues that the Hebrew word means 'young woman,' that the verse refers to Hezekiah's birth, and that the sign was for Ahaz. Justin argues that the Septuagint's parthenos is correct, that the verse predicts a virgin birth, and that the messianic reading was already in Jewish tradition before the Christians took it up. Both arguments are recognizably the arguments still being made.

Two things are visible in the dialogue. The Hezekiah reading was already a Jewish reading by the mid-second century CE, before the medieval Jewish commentators (Rashi, Ibn Ezra) made it the standard rabbinic line. And the philological argument over almah vs parthenos was already being conducted along lines a twenty-first century reader would recognize. Trypho is not a strawman. He represents an actual Jewish reading available in Justin's day, and that reading has continuity with the Ahaz-only position above.

The Immanuel chain across Isaiah 7-9

Isaiah 7:14 does not stand alone. The name Immanuel appears or echoes four times in chapters 7-9. The chain matters because any reading of the verse has to account for what the same prophet does with the same name across two more chapters.

What each side has to account for

The Ahaz-only reading has to explain how Isaiah 8:8 addresses the land as Immanuel's land and how 9:6's throne-names fit an eighth-century coronation. It also has to explain the Septuagint's choice of parthenos when neanis was available. The double-fulfillment reading has to explain how a sign with a horizon of three or four years (7:16) can simultaneously be a sign about a birth seven hundred years later, without the text marking the shift in horizon. The Septuagint-as-distinct-tradition reading has to explain why no Hellenistic Jewish source outside the translation itself comments on a messianic reading of Isaiah 7:14, given how central such a reading would become. The Matthean-reuse reading has to explain why Matthew himself frames his citations as fulfillment rather than reapplication, and why the church received them that way.

All four readings have been held by careful readers who knew the Hebrew. None of them dissolves under scrutiny. The choice between them turns on prior judgments about how prophetic signs work, how Septuagint translations relate to their Hebrew Vorlage, and how the New Testament uses the Hebrew scriptures. Those prior judgments are what each side brings to the verse, and the verse itself is what each side then reads in light of them.