Variations on Isaiah 7:14
Status and Timing
Isaiah 7:14 depicts a prophetic oracle delivered during a crisis in 734-733 BCE, when Syria and the northern kingdom of Israel formed a coalition that threatened the kingdom of Judah. The prophet Isaiah delivered this oracle to King Ahaz while invoking a divine sign meant to reassure the monarch that the hostile kingdoms threatening his realm would soon be taken care of. The oracle centered on a pregnant woman who would bear a son named Immanuel, ‘God is with us’, and the child’s early years would mark the timeline for Judah’s deliverance. Yet this seemingly straightforward message took on very different forms over the following centuries, with translations into Greek and Aramaic revealing interesting interpretive choices. These variations appear in the Hebrew manuscripts discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the standardized Masoretic Hebrew text, the Greek Septuagint translation, and the Targum translations representing Aramaic traditions used in synagogue worship.
Among these text traditions, the Greek Septuagint translation, produced sometime between 150 and 100 BCE, presents the most significant departure from the Hebrew traditions. While debates about vocabulary choices, particularly whether the woman should be understood as a ‘young woman’ or ‘virgin’, have dominated popular and scholarly discussion for centuries1, an equally consequential and contentious interpretation appears in how the Septuagint handles the timing of the events depicted in Isaiah 7. The Hebrew versions, both in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the later Masoretic tradition, use language suggesting the woman is already pregnant at the moment of the oracle’s delivery, with the birth imminent, a present reality unfolding before the prophet’s original audience. The Septuagint translators, however, translated these verbs into future tense, transforming the passage from a sign occurring in Ahaz’s immediate context into an oracle of events yet to come. This change, combined with other translation choices that opened new interpretive possibilities, would fundamentally alter future reception of the text, creating a literary foundation for distinct theological readings that would emerge in later centuries.
So Isaiah answered, “Listen, house of David! Is it not enough that you weary people; must you weary my God also? Therefore the LORD himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman has conceived and is bearing a son, and his name will be Immanuel. (1QIsa 7:13-14)2
Isaiah replied, “Pay attention, family of David. Do you consider it too insignificant to try the patience of men? Is that why you are also trying the patience of my God? For this reason the Lord himself will give you a confirming sign. Look, this young woman is pregnant and will give birth to a son. You, young woman, will name him Immanuel ... (Isaiah 7:13-14)
The Great Isaiah Scroll, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and dated to approximately 125 BCE, provides crucial evidence for understanding the original Hebrew text. This manuscript, predating the standardized Masoretic text by several centuries, confirms that the Hebrew tradition more consistently describes a ‘young woman’ rather than explicitly a ‘virgin.’ The Hebrew term used in both the scroll and the Masoretic text carries no signal that necessitates reading ‘virgin’, simply denoting a young woman of marriageable age. More significantly, both Hebrew texts employ grammar that places the pregnancy in an immediate tense, so the woman is either already pregnant when Isaiah delivers the oracle, or at the least is just about to become pregnant.3 This reading suggests that Ahaz could literally look and see a pregnant woman, perhaps even Isaiah’s own wife, who would soon deliver a child whose early development would serve as a divine timeline.
This reading is supported by the parallel passage following in Isaiah 8:1-4, where the woman, likely Isaiah’s wife, referred to as ‘the prophetess,’ gives birth to a son with another symbolic name. The significance of this child’s name is explicitly tied to a temporal framework in that before he can say ‘father’ or ‘mother,’ within one to two years, the threat from Damascus and Samaria will have ended. The structural parallel between these passages suggests a similar function for the Immanuel child in chapter 7. The sign does not obviously consist in a miraculous conception but in the divinely ordained timing in that before the child reaches the age of moral discernment, the lands of the two kings threatening Judah will lie desolate. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic tradition preserve this reading, where the sign functions as a concrete, near-immediate assurance to Ahaz rather than a distant prophetic vision. The immediacy of the sign, a pregnant woman whose child would mark the deliverance timeline, would have been meaningless as reassurance if it referred to an event in the distant future, a point that becomes particularly relevant when considering how the Septuagint's temporal shift opened new interpretive possibilities.
Isaiah said, “Hear now, O house of David! Is it a small thing for you to provoke a fight with mortals? How then do you provoke a fight with the Lord? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and you shall name him Immanuel ... (LXX Isaiah 7:13-14)4
The Septuagint’s translation of this passage likely stems from multiple converging factors that confronted the Greek translators working several centuries after Isaiah’s time. One central challenge was identifying what exactly constituted the ‘sign’ that God promised to provide. The Hebrew text is relatively ambiguous on this point … if the woman was already pregnant and the birth entirely natural, what made this a divine sign worthy of the introduction? The translators may have reasoned that a true sign from God should involve something more extraordinary than an ordinary pregnancy.5 Their choice of the Greek word parthenos, while it could still mean simply a young woman who had not yet had any children6, carried stronger associations with virginity in Greek usage, thereby introducing the possibility of a more miraculous element. This decision, combined with the shift to future tense verbs, helped to reshape the nature of the sign from divine timing to intervention in the conception itself.
Perhaps more significantly, the Septuagint translators faced the challenge of making this text meaningful for their contemporary audience in a radically different historical context. By the second century BCE, the events surrounding King Ahaz and the coalition of Syria and Israel had receded into distant history, the kingdoms that threatened Judah had long since disappeared, the children mentioned in the prophecy would have lived and died centuries earlier, and the immediate political crisis that prompted the oracle had been resolved for centuries. A straightforward translation preserving the present-tense immediacy of the Hebrew would have rendered the passage as merely a historical record, a divine promise already fulfilled and exhausted of contemporary relevance. By translating the verbs in the future tense, saying the woman ‘will conceive’ and ‘will bear’, the translator may have inadvertently reopened the text’s potential to speak to the future.7 This translation allowed the text to continue to speak to future possibilities rather than past events, enabling subsequent readers to find new meaning in Isaiah’s words that were not a part of the original context or narrative.
Isaiah said, “Hear now, O house of David! Is it too little that you are weary in the prophets, that you weary the words of my God also? Therefore the LORD himself will give you the sign. Behold the young woman is pregnant and shall bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel ... (Targum Jonathan, Isaiah 7:13-14)
The Aramaic Targum’s reading of Isaiah 7:14 is more notable for what it does not say. While Targum Jonathan interprets much of Isaiah through a messianic lens, including Isaiah 9:5-6, which describes the same child mentioned in 7:14, it avoids any messianic language when translating Isaiah 7:14 itself. This silence may have been deliberate, especially given that by the time of the Targum’s final form, Isaiah 7:14 had become a Christian prooftext for the virgin birth. The Rabbinic tradition reflected in the Targum seems to have made a strategic decision to distance this particular verse from messianic interpretation, even while maintaining messianic readings of related passages. This approach allowed Jewish interpreters to incorporate their own understanding of the messianic themes in Isaiah without having to capitulate to Christian readings of the same verse.8
Despite this careful positioning, the Targum remains faithful to the Hebrew text in its translation choices. The Aramaic uses a direct ancestor of the Hebrew word for ‘young woman,’ avoiding any term that would specifically indicate virginity. Regarding the timing of the sign, while the Targum’s grammar can be read as pointing toward the future, the underlying structure still reflects the Hebrew text’s sense of immediacy. The Targum thus walks a careful line in that it preserves the essential elements of the Hebrew tradition, while incorporating unique Aramaic traditions that had developed over the previous centuries. As with all of these translations, the text represents the evolution not only of the language itself, but how it also represents the shifts in how they were read and integrated into contemporary theology.
Penner, Ken M. Septuagint Commentary Series: Isaiah (p. 398) Brill, 2021
Dershowitz, Idan, and Na’ama Pat-El The Forgotten Meaning of אוֹת (pp. 1–43) Vetus Testamentum, 2025
Dershowitz, Idan, and Na’ama Pat-El The Forgotten Meaning of אוֹת (pp. 1–43) Vetus Testamentum, 2025
Penner, Ken M. Septuagint Commentary Series: Isaiah (p. 398) Brill, 2021
Ngunga, Abi T. Messianism in the Old Greek of Isaiah: An Intertextual Analysis (pp. 80-81) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013
Bruce D. Chilton, The Isaiah Targum. Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1987
Thank you for explaining the variations of this verse. It is my belief that Isaiah 7:14 referred firstly to a child born in Isaiah's day. Later, Matthew, influenced by the Septuagint, made an interesting connection between Yahushua (Jesus) and this prophecy (Mat. 1:23). It was like Matthew was saying, "Look, something similar to Yahushua's birth happened in Isaiah's day."