Verse explainer

What does Isaiah 7:14 really mean?

A sign given to a frightened king in 735 BC — and a word whose meaning has been debated ever since.

KJV

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

BSB

Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will be with child and give birth to a son, and will call Him Immanuel.

The plain meaning

King Ahaz of Judah faces a military coalition of Syria and Israel and refuses to ask God for a sign (vv. 10–12). So God gives one anyway — not for Ahaz's sake, but for the house of David whose covenant promises were still alive. A child named Immanuel ('God with us') will be born, and before he is old enough to know right from wrong, the two threatening kingdoms will be gone (vv. 15–16). That near-term framing is real. But the language the prophet reaches for — 'the virgin,' a name meaning 'God with us,' a child who is later described as 'mighty God' (9:6) — strains past any ordinary birth announcement. Matthew (1:23) reads the verse as finding its fullest weight in Jesus's birth, and the Septuagint (pre-Christian Jewish translators) had already rendered the Hebrew word here as 'virgin' centuries before him. The text is doing double work: a sign to Ahaz's generation, and an anchor for a larger hope. Both readings are in the passage; neither erases the other.

The common misreading

'Almah just means young woman — the virgin birth is read back into a verse that never said it.' This is the most common objection, and it deserves a straight answer. It is true that 'almah' does not carry the legal force of the word 'betulah' (often translated 'virgin' in a more technical sense). But in every one of its nine Old Testament uses, 'almah' refers to a woman who is unmarried and, by context, sexually inexperienced. It is never used of a wife or a mother. More tellingly, Jewish scholars translating the Hebrew into Greek roughly two centuries before Jesus — with no stake in Christian claims — chose 'parthenos,' the unambiguous Greek word for virgin. If the word simply meant 'young woman,' a blander Greek term was available and they did not use it. The near-term sign to Ahaz is also real: the child's early years mark the window for the fall of Syria and Israel (vv. 15–16), which did happen. But the sign's own language — 'God with us,' the mother addressed with 'behold,' the later description of the same child as 'mighty God' in 9:6 — exceeds any ordinary birth. Matthew is not importing a foreign meaning; he is reading the verse the way its earliest translators already read it.

What the commentators say

John Gill18th c. · PD

Gill argues the word translated 'virgin' (almah) consistently refers to an unmarried, sexually pure woman throughout the Hebrew scriptures, and that the Septuagint's rendering as 'virgin' centuries before Matthew confirms this. He sees the miraculous birth of the Messiah from a true virgin as the actual 'sign' — since a young married woman simply becoming pregnant would be no wonder at all, and would offer Ahaz no meaningful assurance.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown19th c. · PD

JFB reads the prophecy as genuinely double-layered: its language is carefully chosen to fit a near event (a child born in Isaiah's day whose early years would mark the fall of the two hostile kingdoms) while pointing beyond it to a greater fulfillment. They note that 'virgin' fits Mary more precisely than the prophetess, who had already borne children, and that 'Immanuel — God with us' reaches its proper depth only in the one later called 'mighty God' in Isaiah 9:6.

The word behind it

עַלְמָה almah

'Almah' — from a root meaning 'to be hidden or concealed,' denoting a young woman of marriageable age kept from public male contact. It appears nine times in the Hebrew Bible and is never used of a married woman. The Septuagint translators rendered it 'parthenos' (virgin) here well before the New Testament. The debate is whether it requires virginity strictly or allows a broader sense; its every biblical usage fits a woman who is in fact a virgin, which is why Matthew's citation is not a stretch but a natural reading of the Greek text the early church already held.

Related verses