A Sign Offered to the House of David

Every Christmas the church reads a sentence spoken in Jerusalem some seven hundred years before the birth it describes. A frightened king stood at a water channel outside the city, the prophet Isaiah came to meet him, and the Lord promised a son who would be called Immanuel1. Matthew quotes that sentence in the first chapter of his Gospel and says plainly that it was fulfilled when Mary, a virgin, conceived by the Holy Ghost and bore Jesus.

The setting is the reign of Ahaz, king of Judah. Rezin, king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, had joined forces and marched on Jerusalem. Their plan, as Isaiah reports it, was to break Judah open and set a king of their own choosing on David's throne, a man named only as the son of Tabeal. The line of David itself was under threat, and when the news came, Ahaz and his people shook.

And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up toward Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate with Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

Isaiah 7:1-2
KJV

God sent Isaiah to meet the king at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, and told him to bring his son Shearjashub with him (Isaiah 7:3). The message was short: "Take heed, and be quiet; fear not." The two kings were nothing more than smoking firebrands, burnt out at the end. Their counsel would not stand. Then came the warning that hangs over everything that follows: "If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established" (Isaiah 7:9).

"Ask Thee a Sign"

God went further than a promise. He offered Ahaz proof of his own choosing, anything at all, as deep as the depths or as high as the heavens. Ahaz refused, and dressed the refusal in pious words.

Moreover the LORD spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?

Isaiah 7:10-13
KJV

The book of Kings shows what lay behind those words. Ahaz had already decided where his help would come from. He sent messengers to Tiglathpileser king of Assyria with the words "I am thy servant and thy son," and he paid for the alliance with the silver and gold of the house of the LORD (2 Kings 16:7-8). A sign from God would have bound him to trust God, and he did not intend to. Matthew Henry puts it exactly: "A secret disaffection to God is often disguised with the specious colours of respect to him; and those who are resolved that they will not trust God yet pretend that they will not tempt him."

Isaiah's answer turns from the king to the whole royal line. He addresses the "house of David," and the Hebrew word for "you" in the next verse is plural. The sign is no longer offered to Ahaz for his choosing. It is given, by the Lord himself, to David's house, and it concerns David's house. Henry again: "the unbelief of man shall not make the promise of God of no effect."

The Sign Itself

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

Isaiah 7:14
KJV

The sentence opens with "Behold," the word the prophets use to point at something God is about to set before his people's eyes. Then come four things: a woman, a conception, a son, and a name. A sign that God himself gives, after a king has refused one that could reach to heaven, ought to be a wonder. The early church read it that way from the beginning. John Chrysostom asked: "If the one who was to give birth was not a virgin but the conception occurred in the natural manner, then what sort of sign would this be? A sign must be extraordinary and strange, or how else could it be a sign?" Justin Martyr made the same point to a Jewish questioner in the second century: "For if He also were to be begotten of sexual intercourse, like all other first-born sons, why did God say that He would give a sign which is not common to all the first-born sons?"

The Word Translated "Virgin"

The Hebrew word behind the King James "virgin" is almah2. Strong's lexicon defines it as "a lass (as veiled or private)" and gives its renderings as "damsel, maid, virgin." It is the feminine of elem3, a lad or young man. In Isaiah 7:14 it has the article in Hebrew: the almah, a particular young woman.

The word appears seven times in the Old Testament, and the King James translators rendered it three ways:

Where Scripture lets the reader see who the almah is, she is an unmarried girl. In Exodus 2 she is the infant Moses's sister, sent by Pharaoh's daughter to fetch a nurse. In Genesis 24 she is Rebekah at the well, and the same chapter has already described her as "a virgin, neither had any man known her" (Genesis 24:16), using the other Hebrew word for a virgin, bethulah4. One girl is called by both words in one chapter. In the Song of Solomon the virgins are set apart from the queens and the concubines.

So the lexicon does not define almah as narrowly as bethulah, and nothing more should be claimed for it than it shows. What it shows is a word for a young woman not yet married, used in Scripture of girls who were virgins, Rebekah plainly so. Isaiah 7:14 is the one place where the context itself, a sign given by God, presses the meaning to its fullest.

The Greek translators before Christ

Long before Matthew wrote, the Old Testament had been put into Greek, in the translation known as the Septuagint. At Isaiah 7:14 its translators rendered almah with parthenos5, the ordinary Greek word that Strong's defines as "a maiden; by implication, an unmarried daughter" and which the King James renders "virgin" every time. They did the same at Genesis 24:43, Rebekah again; at the other almah passages they used other words. The rendering in Isaiah was not a Christian invention: it stood in the Greek Old Testament that Greek-speaking Jews were reading before Mary was born. Jerome, who knew the Hebrew well, observed that the word here is alma, "which all except the Septuagint translated as 'young woman.'" Matthew's Greek uses the same word, and with it the meaning Isaiah's sign had carried all along.

Irenaeus, writing in the second century against those who made Jesus the natural son of Joseph, tied the sign back to the promise made to David: "the promise which God had made, of raising up a King from the fruit of [David's] belly, was fulfilled in the birth from the Virgin, that is, from Mary."

Immanuel, "God with Us"

The child's name is a sentence. Strong's derives it from the Hebrew for "with" and the suffix for "us," joined to the word for God, and gives its meaning as "with us (is) God." In Hebrew the name is two words, immanu and El. Matthew carries it into Greek as Emmanuel6 and translates it for his readers: "which being interpreted is, God with us."

The angel told Joseph to call the child JESUS, "for he shall save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). The two names do not compete. Immanuel says who he is; Jesus says what he came to do. Henry joins them in one line: "if he had not been Immanuel—God with us, he could not have been Jesus—a Saviour." For the other names the Scriptures give him, see 10 Names of Jesus and What They Mean.

The Prophecy Runs On: Isaiah 8 to 11

Isaiah does not drop the child after one verse. The name returns in the next chapter. The Assyrian flood that Ahaz invited would sweep through Judah up to the neck, and Isaiah calls the land by its true owner's name: "thy land, O Immanuel." Two verses later the same two Hebrew words close a defiant word to the nations, which the King James renders "for God is with us."

And he shall pass through Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel. Associate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of far countries: gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand: for God is with us.

Isaiah 8:8-10
KJV

The land belongs to Immanuel, so it cannot be swallowed whole; and because God is with his people, the counsels of the nations come to nothing. Henry draws the comfort out for the house of David: "nothing can cut off the entail on the Son of David that shall be Immanuel."

A chapter later the child appears again, and this time he is named at length. He is born to us, a son given to us, and he sits on David's throne for ever.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.

Isaiah 9:6-7
KJV

Among his names is "The mighty God." In Hebrew it is El7 gibbor, and El is the same word that ends the name Immanuel. Isaiah uses that exact title again a chapter later of the LORD himself: "The remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the mighty God" (Isaiah 10:21). The child who is God with us bears the name of the God to whom Israel returns. For this chapter in full, see "The People Who Walked in Darkness Have Seen a Great Light" (Isaiah 9).

Then the house of David, which Ahaz had shaken by his unbelief, is pictured as a felled tree. The word rendered "stem" is, in Strong's definition, the trunk or stump of a tree, and from that stump comes new growth.

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: And the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD;

Isaiah 11:1-2
KJV

Read together, Isaiah 7 to 11 is one movement. A king of David's line refuses God's sign; God gives the sign to David's house anyway; the child of the sign owns the land, bears the name of the mighty God, takes David's throne for ever, and grows up as a Branch from Jesse's roots when the royal tree has been cut down. The virgin's son of chapter 7 is the Son of David of chapters 9 and 11. For how Isaiah's prophecies of Christ fit together across the whole book, see An Introduction to Isaiah: The Gospel in the Old Testament.

A Sign for Ahaz's Day as Well?

The verses after the sign set a clock. Before the child knows to refuse the evil and choose the good, "the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings" (Isaiah 7:16). That came true within a few years. The king of Assyria took Damascus and slew Rezin (2 Kings 16:9), and Hoshea conspired against Pekah and slew him (2 Kings 15:30).

Faithful readers have understood this near promise in two ways. Matthew Henry held that the virgin's son is Christ alone, and that the child of verse 16 is Isaiah's own boy, standing at his father's side: "he means not Immanuel, but Shear-jashub his own son." Others see a sign with a first, partial answer in Ahaz's own day, pointing to Isaiah's second son, whose birth follows at once in chapter 8 with almost the same timetable: before he can say "My father, and my mother," Damascus and Samaria would be plundered by Assyria (Isaiah 8:3-4). Isaiah himself says, "I and the children whom the LORD hath given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel" (Isaiah 8:18).

Either way, nothing in Ahaz's day answered the whole of the sign. No child born then was conceived by a virgin, owned the land, bore the name of the mighty God, or sat on David's throne for ever. Isaiah's own chapters will not let the promise rest on an ordinary child, and Matthew, writing by the Spirit, declares where it was fulfilled. That fulfilment carries the weight here.

Fulfilled in the Virgin Birth

Matthew tells the story from Joseph's side. Mary was espoused to him, and "before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 1:18). Joseph, a just man, meant to put her away quietly, until the angel of the Lord came to him in a dream (see Joseph's Dilemma and the Angel's Dream). Then Matthew stops the narrative to say what it all means.

Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Matthew 1:22-23
KJV

Matthew says the words were spoken "of the Lord by the prophet": the speaker in Isaiah 7:14 is God, and Isaiah is his mouth. He closes the account with a detail that leaves no room for doubt about the conception. Joseph took Mary as his wife and "knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son" (Matthew 1:25).

Luke tells the same event from Mary's side. Gabriel was sent "to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph," and Luke uses parthenos for her twice in one verse (Luke 1:27). When the angel told her she would conceive a son, she asked the question the whole sign turns on.

Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

Luke 1:34-35
KJV

For the whole visit, see The Annunciation to Mary: The Angel Gabriel's Visit. Two Gospels, written from two households, agree on the fact: Mary conceived without a man, by the power of the Holy Ghost. Justin Martyr explained it to the emperor in his First Apology: "This, then, 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive,' signifies that a virgin should conceive without intercourse. For if she had had intercourse with any one whatever, she was no longer a virgin." Henry gives the reason God chose this way: Christ "shall be born of a virgin, which will signify both the divine power and the divine purity with which he shall be brought into the world." Isaiah 7:14 belongs among the great prophecies of Christ's first coming, set beside Micah's Bethlehem and Isaiah's suffering servant in 10 Key Prophecies About Jesus and Their Fulfillment.

God with Us at Christmas

Ahaz looked at two kings and an army and could not believe that God was with him. The sign he refused was kept for a stable in Bethlehem, where God was with his people in a way no one in Jerusalem that day could have imagined: in the flesh of a child, born of a woman of David's house. Gregory of Nazianzus said it in a few short sentences: "Although he was already begotten, he was born of a woman, who was a virgin. Because his birth was from a woman, it was human. Because she was a virgin, it was divine."

The virgin birth is the way the eternal Son came into the world without ceasing to be what he was. He was Mary's son, and so fully man; he had no human father, because his Father is God. Paul puts it in a sentence: "when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). For the doctrine behind the manger, see The Doctrine of the Incarnation: God Became Man, and for the Christmas story itself, Christmas: The Birth of Jesus.

John gives the sign its last word. The name Isaiah announced became a life lived among us, and those who saw it bore witness.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

John 1:14
KJV