by

 Damien F. Mackey

  

“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 

“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”)”.

 Matthew 1:22-23

  

Introduction

 

Those who insist that this text of Matthew is a literal fulfilment of Isaiah 7:14 are doomed to failure.

Try as one may, the literal details in the ancient text of Isaiah 7 just cannot be fitted (or fit, as is popular today) to what took place at the time of the Incarnation and Nativity of Jesus Christ.

 

The attentive reader of Isaiah (who knows a bit of history) will be aware that the historical setting for the ancient story is the C8th BC, when an ambitious Syrian king, Rezin, bent upon creating a Greater Syria (much like Benjamin Netanyahu, today, with his Greater Israel), had joined forces with the king of Israel, Pekah.

And a focal aim of this coalition was to conquer and rule Judah (Jerusalem) wherein king Ahaz presently reigned (7:1). 

 

In the midst of all this there arrives the great prophet Isaiah, empowered by the Lord to show a miraculous sign to king Ahaz, in order to strengthen him to turn to the Lord in this time of trial, when the hearts of he and the nation of Judah were said to be “shaken, as the trees of the forest are shaken by the wind” (7:2).  

 

Unfortunately, though, Ahaz had determined that it will be ‘my way or the highway’. He will reject Isaiah’s (the Lord’s) offer and will turn instead for help to the mighty, “the King of Assyria” (7:17), Tiglath-pileser.

 

This will prompt Isaiah, who had initially been most tolerant and respectful towards the king, to switch from referring to the Lord as “your God” (7:11), to “my God” (7:13).

 

King Ahaz, who will choose Assyrian overlordship over divine Lordship, was no more, therefore, entitled to be regarded as one belonging to the Lord.

 

Obviously, none of this - C8th BC; Syro-Ephraïmite civil war; Assyrian king, Ahaz - can have any literal relationship whatsoever to the Infancy era of Jesus Christ: by then, king Ahaz was long dead and the kingdom of Assyria had ceased to exist!

 

But even the more personal details pertaining to Isaiah cannot be force-fitted to Matthew 1:22-23.

 

The Isaian family

 

Isaiah and his family are merely types of the greater reality that is to come.

 

Isaiah can remind one typologically of God the Father, with his future son, Immanuel.

An un-asked for sign will be given to Ahaz and his House, the sign of Immanuel.

 

But the literal Isaiah already had one other son, Shear-jashub, with whom he met Ahaz (7:3): ^“Then the Lord said to Isaiah, ‘Go out, you and your son Shear-Jashub, to meet Ahaz at the end of the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field’.”

This text can have no literal New Testament correspondence.

 

Moreover, “Immanuel”, which will be the personal name of Isaiah’s second son, “… will call him Immanuel”, was not the personal name of the future Messiah, which was “Jesus” (Matthew 1:21): ‘You shall name him Jesus’.

 

            The Woman

 

Isaiah’s wife is described by the much-discussed Hebrew word, almah (עַלְמָה), which can apparently mean “young woman (of marriageable age)”, or, indeed, “virgin” - while the accompanying verb, harah (הָרָה֙), means to be with child.

It seems, however, to be set in the past tense.

 

Matthew the Evangelist, using a typically Hebrew pesher interpretation of this text - and in light of what he knew that the Holy Spirit had intended in the greater scheme of things - will take the almah in its legitimate translation as “virgin”, and will make of the verb, harah, the future tense: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”. 

 

But that, as we have found, cannot be a literal interpretation of Isaiah 7:14, which “retains its own intrinsic value” (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, # 129).

 

Unlike as was the case with the Holy Family, one son (Shear-jashub) had already been born, and was actually present there (standing or being carried) with his prophet father, as Isaiah approached King Ahaz. 

And, if Isaiah’s wife was also the mother of Shear-jashub, then, obviously, she could not have been a virgin.

 

In a previous article:

 

Was Hosea’s boy-child, Lo-Ammi, Isaiah’s famous son, Immanuel?

 

(7) Was Hosea's boy-child, Lo-Ammi, Isaiah's famous son, Immanuel?

 

in which I folded, as one, Isaiah and the prophet Hosea, the woman, Gomer, became the mother of all of the following four children, three boys and a girl:

 

Shear-jashub = Jezreel;

Lo-ruhamah (girl);

Immanuel = Lo-ammi;

Maher-shalal-hash-baz

 

Immanuel was, in fact, her third child.

 

Yet, the Messiah, a Divine Person, was far more perfectly the fulfilment of the name, Immanuel, “God is with us”, than any Old Testament, or even New Testament character could possibly hope to have been.