The Great Christ Comet (38 page)

The Immanuel Oracle: The Virgin and Her Child

One scholar has called Isaiah 7:14 “the most controversial passage in the Bible.”
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Debate has particularly focused on the identity of the prophesied child. Was it someone born in Isaiah's day? If so, was it a son of Isaiah,
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or a son of Ahaz, either Hezekiah
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or an anonymous younger sibling of Hezekiah?
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Or was it someone born in the future, namely the Messiah.
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Inextricably linked to this debate is the question of the identity of “the virgin” who gives birth to the child. Was she Isaiah's wife? Was she a member of Ahaz's royal harem? Or was she simply a woman who happened to be passing by when Isaiah was meeting with Ahaz? Or, was she the mother of the Messiah?

We must first ask a simple question: Does the oracle speak of the near future or of the distant future or of both? It is clear from 7:15–8:8 that it does speak to the near future.
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At the same time, 8:8–10 and 9:2–7, as well as 11:1–16, reveal that the prophet is looking beyond the near future into the distant future. So it is best to conclude that Isaiah's oracle has a relevance to both the near future and the distant future. As we shall see below, this dual perspective comes to the surface in 9:1, where Isaiah speaks of “the former time,” which brings distress and darkness, and “the latter time,” which brings joy and light.

As to the identity of the newborn of 7:14 in Isaiah's near future, in light of what the prophet reports in 8:3–4, it is difficult to deny that “Immanuel” was Maher-shalal-hash-baz, Isaiah's second son: “And I went to the prophetess, and she
conceived
and
bore a son
. Then Yahweh said to me, ‘
Call his name
Maher-shalal-hash-baz, for before the boy knows how to cry ‘My father' or ‘My mother,' the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria will be carried away before the king of Assyria.” Here not only do we have a clear allusion back to Isaiah 7:14's conception, childbirth, and naming, but we also have the birth being regarded as the beginning of a countdown to the fulfillment of Yahweh's promise to punish Syria and Israel, just as in 7:15–16 (where Immanuel's birth marks the start of a countdown to the desertion of Syria and Israel). A further indication that “Immanuel” in Isaiah's day was the prophet's second son is found in 8:18, where we read that Isaiah and his sons are “signs and portents in Israel from Yahweh of hosts.” We recall that 7:14 spoke of the birth of Immanuel as a “sign.” Of course, if Maher-shalal-hash-baz was “Immanuel,” then the “virgin” (
almah
) of 7:14 was Isaiah's wife, the prophetess.

Compared to this view, other proposed identifications of the newborn baby boy in the late 730s BC come up short. In particular, the identification of Immanuel as Hezekiah fails on the grounds of chronology. Whichever chronology of the kings of Judah one adopts, Hezekiah was certainly born well before the Syro-Ephraimite crisis.

Moreover, it is hard to see why the naming of a young, non-succeeding son of Ahaz by a concubine in the royal household might constitute a sign signaling divine judgment on the king.

The idea that “the virgin” was simply a passerby can be safely rejected, since it is ridiculous to imagine Ahaz, who did not want the sign and had no intention of heeding it, proceeding to track an anonymous woman to her home and getting updates about her pregnancy, delivery, and naming of her child.

Although we judge that the “virgin” in Isaiah's day was his prophetess wife and the newborn was his second son, Maher-shalal-hash-baz, this interpretation is not without apparent difficulties. The main perceived problem centers on the particular word used to describe the woman:
almah
. Isaiah's wife, if she is the same woman who previously bore him Shear-jashub, does not seem a ready fit for the role of
almah
. That is because the word is not a natural one to use of a married woman
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and certainly not one who has already had a child.
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Indeed, although the term
does not refer to virginity as such, generally speaking an
almah
is sexually inexperienced.
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It has been suggested that Isaiah's first wife, the mother of Shear-jashub, had died and that Isaiah had recently married a second wife, the prophetess, so that he is referring to a woman who at the point that he was speaking was a bona fide
almah
, in the sense that she had not previously borne a child.
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That possibility should not be quickly dismissed, although it is probably unnecessary to resort to this.

With respect to the distant future, there can be no question but that the birth of the Messiah was in view.

The royal birth announcement in Isaiah 9:6–7 makes this abundantly clear: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore.” The child would be the ultimate son of David who fulfilled the Davidic covenant and was divine in nature.

That Isaiah 7:14 had in view the birth of the Messiah is also strongly supported by 11:1–3a, 4b–10. There, in the climax of chapters 7–12, Isaiah again referred to the arrival of the Messiah on the earthly scene and his ultimate destiny:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch
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from his roots shall bear fruit.

And the Spirit of Yahweh shall rest upon him,

the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the Spirit of counsel and might,

the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of Yahweh.

And his delight shall be in the fear of Yahweh. . . .

and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,

and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze;

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,

and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.

They shall not hurt or destroy

in all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yahweh

as the waters cover the sea.

In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

In this passage Isaiah makes it explicit that the birth that was uppermost in his mind during the Syro-Ephraimite Crisis was, strikingly, that of the Messiah.

Accordingly, in the near future the
almah
in Isaiah 7:14 was Isaiah's wife, the prophetess, and in the distant future she was the Messiah's mother.

Whatever ambiguity there was concerning the word
almah
, the simple fact is that if the offspring was divine, as the name Immanuel (“God with us”) implied (cf. 9:6), the only natural conclusion to reach was that the
almah
was a virgin, with the father of Immanuel being divine and the means of reproduction being nonsexual.

It is doubtful if Ahaz grasped the full meaning and significance of the sign. To him, the oracle may have sounded like an adaptation of a pagan myth concerning the birth of a child to a virgin mother goddess, like the ancient Egyptian myth of the “virgin” goddess Isis and her son Horus. The pagan king of Judah may well have assumed that the prophesied myth-like sign would be enacted in some kind of drama. Indeed drama was a common prophetic tool. Isaiah 20 records that Isaiah walked around “naked and barefoot” for three years “as a sign and portent against Egypt and Cush” (v. 3a), prophetically playing the role of an Egyptian or Cushite taken captive by the Assyrians (vv. 3b–4).

Isaiah 7:14 was indeed disclosing a drama, an extraordinary one. The dramatization of the virgin and Immanuel would be spread over ten months and involve a real pregnancy and birth. When Ahaz saw Isaiah's wife, the prophetess, pregnant, and then learned that she had given birth to Maher-shalal-hash-baz and (as Isaiah 7–8 implies) named him “Immanuel,” he would have understood that the woman and her son were playing the parts of the virgin and her divine child.

For Isaiah, however, his wife was not playing the part of a virgin mother goddess in a mythical scene, but rather the part of the Messiah's mother as she became pregnant with and gave birth to the divine Son of God. It was the Messiah's mother who would be “
the
virgin.” She alone could with full justification use the name “God with us” to describe her son.

That the drama unfolding in 733 BC was not the actual, full fulfillment of Isaiah's oracle was clear simply by virtue of the nature of the actors playing the key roles—Isaiah's wife, particularly if she was already a mother, seems to have lacked the qualifications to be a bona fide
almah
, and Isaiah's second son was certainly not divine (he was not, in truth, “God with us” [or “Mighty God”])—and by virtue of the participation of Isaiah in the drama, impregnating his wife.

However, the outworking of the “sign” in Isaiah's day was not devoid of impressive elements, because Isaiah's wife did conceive, did give birth to a boy, and did, evidently without Isaiah's personal intervention, prophetically name him Immanuel, all in accord with the prophetic word.

Maher-shalal-hash-baz was a “sign” pointing forward to the true son of the virgin, the divine Messiah. As Isaiah framed it, Maher-shalal-hash-baz's very existence was a rebuke to the Davidic dynasty—God would fulfill his promises to David not through the seed of Ahaz or one of his dynastic successors, but rather through an adopted son of David born of a virginal conception. After all, Yahweh's plan was to unite his own house with that of David (2 Samuel 7), causing a virgin girl to become pregnant by nonsexual means.

That the second son of Isaiah was a dramatic type, pointing forward to the Messiah, is clear in 8:8–10. In 8:5–8 Isaiah prophesied concerning the near future but in verse 8 he suddenly spoke of the land as belonging to
Immanuel. This makes it clear that Immanuel there was not Maher-shalal-hash-baz but the Messiah whom he represented. This conclusion is supported by the fact that verses 9–10 go on to present an eschatological word of judgment to the nations that scheme against Israel-Judah, “for God is with us.” This final element intimates that Immanuel in the person of the Messiah would rescue his people from the international conspiracy at the end of the age. The allusion to the very ancient Davidic Psalm 2 is forceful—that psalm, widely regarded as a coronation psalm, warned a conspiracy of nations not to rebel against the Messiah but to submit to him in advance of his coming in wrath.

The sign had significance for Isaiah's own day too, of course. Positively, it demonstrated that God would fulfill his promise to neutralize Ahaz's enemies Syria and Israel (Isa. 7:15–16; 8:3–4). Negatively, since it was none other than God who was Judah's covenant partner, Ahaz's religious treachery could not go unpunished (7:17–25). The sign showed that Yahweh was turning away his favor from the Davidic dynasty that had ruled an independent Judah for 200 years. The dynasty of David, associated with Ahaz, had been exposed by Isaiah as unworthy. Judah would now lose its independence and become a vassal state, and embark on an inevitable path toward destruction and deportation.

The messianic drama acted out by Isaiah's wife and second son was a fitting sign both positively and negatively. Because the kings of Syria and Israel had shown contempt for the Davidic covenant, a sign that highlighted the ultimate fulfillment of God's promise to unite his house with David's was appropriate. In addition, because Ahaz had violated the Davidic covenant, a sign that emphasized that the future of the Davidic covenant lay with a virgin-born Messiah rather than the reigning Davidic dynasty had punch. To what extent the message conveyed by the sign was understood by Ahaz, however, is unclear—it is doubtful that he took much notice of Isaiah's word. Indeed 2 Chronicles 28:22–23 seems to imply that Ahaz by this time had started worshiping the gods of Syria in a desperate bid to secure their favor against his enemy, Rezin king of Syria.
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Isaiah 7:14 and the Birth of Jesus

How was Isaiah 7:14 interpreted in the period running up to the birth of Jesus? Regrettably, we lack Jewish texts from the pre-Christian period that comment on Isaiah 7:14's meaning. One tentative indication that the oracle may sometimes have been interpreted within Second Temple Judaism as referring to the Messiah may be the Septuagint's rendering of
almah
with
parthenos
. Usually
parthenos
implies sexual chastity. If the Septuagint (LXX) translator was using it in this sense, then he may have interpreted
almah
in the context of Isaiah 7:14 to imply virginity and therefore may have believed that the oracle revealed that the Messiah would be born by supernatural, nonsexual agency.
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Certainly, early Christians regarded Isaiah 7:14 as predicting Jesus's birth to a virgin. In no place is this clearer than in Matthew 1:18–25, where Matthew explicitly quotes Isaiah's oracle: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin [
parthenos
] shall be with child [
in gastri hexei
] and shall give birth to a son [
texetai huion
], and they shall call him Immanuel' (which means, ‘God with us')” (vv. 22–23).
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The use of
parthenos
here probably indicates that Matthew was convinced that Isaiah was predicting that the Messiah would be conceived nonsexually in the body of a virgin.