Apikorus

Of course it was intended as a prophecy. The prophecy was that before the child Immanuel would reach the age of moral suasion, the threat to Judah posed by Pekah in Israel and Rezin in Damascus would dissolve.

Regarding the whole virgin thang, it is a tempest in a teapot. The plain sense of the Hebrew is that a young woman (Heb. almah) would give birth. It seems quite clear that almah means "young woman" because the masculine form elem also appears in the Hebrew Bible, and does not connote virginity. It is well known that Isaiah is among the poorest books of the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek in the LXX (Eissfeldt thought it was so poor that it was "of little use" for HB text criticism); it is quite plausible that parthenos is simply a mistranslation. Still, even if one insists on the LXX reading, it is hardly clear that Isa 7:14 is saying that a virgin will give birth. It could be read as saying, "behold! the woman who is now a virgin will (sometime later be naturally impregnated and) conceive and bear a son, named Immanuel." (I recall Raymond Brown proffering this reading, in Birth of the Messiah.) Again, the prophecy here is not Immanuel's birth per se, but rather the desolation of Israel and Damascus in the context of the Syro-Ephraimite war. The prophecy is paralleled by that in chapter 8, where the child of significance is Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Note the repetition of the formula ky b+rM yd( hn(r X = "for before the child knows how to X", where X = "refuse evil and choose good" (ch. 7) or "cry" (ch. 8). (There is still more in parallel between the two chapters.)

In light of the prophecy in Isa 7:15-16, I find the traditional Christian identification of Immanuel = Jesus to be a bit ironic, since Isaiah clearly implies that the child Immanuel would for some time not know right from wrong, as is the case with all children. The New Testament says famously little about Jesus' childhood, but I'd guess most Christians would be uncomfortable with the notion of a bratty sinful child Jesus. (It is presumably for this reason that the Christian commentator Matthew Henry identifies the child in Isa 7:15-16 not as Immanuel, but rather as Shear-Yashuv -- a tendentious reading which must be admired for its sheer idiocy.)

Phlox Pyros

I think you are saying this because you are thinking in terms of something that was written with the intent of writing prophecy, but this is not what I am saying.

That is not how the ancients viewed their texts. They would read their texts and find things in them that related to their own time, thus believing them to have been prophecies (perhaps overlooked until the event had actually occurred).

No evidence for it to have been viewed as prophecy beforehand, correct. That does not mean that it was not seen as such after the fact.

Ah, but there is a way to test it! Check the translation of parthenos elsewhere in the Septuagint with the Hebrew text.

Here is every instance in the book of Isaiah in the Septuagint that I could find where the Hebrew bethulah was translated into the Greek as parthenos:

Isaiah 23:4
Isaiah 37:22
Isaiah 47:1
Isaiah 62:5

The only instance of parthenos not in this list (that I am aware of) is Isaiah 7:14! This seems to me to make the matter a little more than specious.

Phlox Pyros

Thanks, Apikorus, for the good info. I doubt I could keep up with your Hebrew skills. Again, I'm just arguing this for the heck of it. However, I do think that the Septuagint reading is too easily dismissed as a simple mistranslation.

I don't have the study behind me to make that kind of judgement, but I wonder how much of that assessment is based on its use by Christians as messianic prophecy? How much of this assessment could be due to bias and the desire of some (however unintentional) to remove these messianic claims? Just asking...

S.C.Carlson

Not really. The assessment is based on how free the translation is.

Phlox Pyros

Thanks. Is it really that free a translation?

Darn my skepticism! Now I'm gonna have to do a comparison. It seems pretty literal from the snippets I've looked at so far.

Diogenes the Cynic

But so what? I think the intent of the text is all that matters, and Isaiah was never intended as a Messianic prophecy, nor is there any evidence that it was ever subsequently read as such before Matthew.
Before what? It was read as a prophecy, just not as a Messianic prophecy and it was read as already fulfilled.
After what fact?
Not really. parthenos is the correct translation of bethulah. What else would you expect? I think the place to look is for other LXX translations of almah. Even then, I don't think other translations of almah would be very probative outside of Isaiah. It's not like the entire LXX only had one translator.

Like I said, bethulah wouldn't even make sense in context and there would be no reason for the DSS community (which showed no awareness of Christianity) to alter the word.

Phlox Pyros

I know. So if the Septuagint used parthenos to correctly translate bethulah in every place in Isaiah, then it seems plausible that there may have been a Hebrew variant in Isaiah 7:14 (ie. a variant that read bethulah rather than almah) that is responsible for the Greek word parthenos in this verse in the Septuagint.

Apikorus

Stephen is quite correct. The translation isn't only free, by the way -- it is at times highly tendentious. For example, the MT of Isa 19:25 says,

Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance.

The LXX, on the other hand, reads,

Blessed be my people who are in Egypt, and who are in Assyria, and my inheritance Israel.

The case of the Tyre oracle in Isa 23 is particularly interesting -- see here.

Chris Weimer

Both Genesis 24.13 and 24.43 attest to the Greek παρθενος as being a translation for Hebrew עלמה.

Amaleq13

"Shall conceive" or "is with child"? I understood it to be the latter.