Help for Advent and Christmas Sermons
Almah - Problem Passages and
Messianic Prophecy
Presented at the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod’s Missouri District,
Washington Circuit Pastoral Conference
Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, Hermann, Missouri
November 15, 2011
By Herman Otten

Part I

The doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. The LCMS’ Lutheran Witness was correct when it said in 1957 “The doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ is a fundamental article of our faith the denial of which makes saving faith in Christ impossible.” This statement is quoted in the chapter on the Virgin Birth of Christ in Baal or God published by Lutheran News in 1965. Most of the translators of the NCC’s RSV were modernists and higher critics of the Bible who denied the virgin birth of Christ. Baal or God shows that some prominent Lutherans denied the virgin birth of Christ. Today, even within our Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, churchmen like Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who denied such doctrines as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, are hailed as great committed Christians. Our St. Louis seminary has said Bonhoeffer was the greatest Lutheran since Martin Luther. Bonhoeffer and King - Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963 - 2011 - A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual Laziness, published this year by Christian News documents the theology of King and Bonhoeffer.

It’s unfortunate that even the LCMS’ Lutheran Service Book includes hymns by Harry Emerson Fosdick and Georgia Harkness, who denied the virgin birth of Christ and other fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

Of course not everyone who denies that almah should be translated virgin or rejects direct messianic prophecy denies the Christian faith. There always is what orthodox theologians call “Glücklichess Inconsequenz,” fortunate inconsistency. Now let’s look at the Hebrew word almah.

“God’s Word Will Stand” from p. 340 of the Third Edition of William F. Beck’s An American Translation:

Many in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, including the LCMS’ Worship Commission and Paul McCain of Concordia Publishing House, have said that the Revised Standard Version of the National Council of Churches is a reliable and accurate version.

How some Bibles and Commentaries Translate almah in Isaiah 7:14

1. Good News Bible - The Bible in Today’s English Version - American Bible Society Distributed at an LCMS convention in 1976, “a young woman”.

2. Holman Study Bible - Revised Standard Version, 1952, “a young woman”.

3. The Living Bible Paraphrased - Tyndale, 1973. (11,375,000 Living Bibles in print by 1973). “The Controversial Hebrew word used here sometimes means “virgin” and sometimes “young woman.’ Its immediate use here refers to Isaiah’s young wife and her newborn son (Isaiah 8:1-4).

4. The James Moffet Translation - Harper & Row, 1954, “young woman”.

5. The New English Bible - Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1970, “a young woman”.

6. The Jerusalem Bible - Doubleday. Imprimatur - John Cardinal Heenan, 1966, “the maiden”. Immediate appellation does not refer to the virgin birth of Christ - footnote on p. 1153.

7. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Edited by Raymond E. Brown, S.J., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, St. and Roland E. Murphy, O, Carr. Foreword by Augustine Cardinal Bea, S.J. Imprimatur Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, 1968.

“Isaiah does not use the technical term for ‘virgin’ (bethulah) but a word (‘almah‘) that signifies a young woman of marriageable age, whether a virgin or not”, p. 270.

8. The Jerome Bible Commentary, Second Edition, 1990 “the young woman: Here almah is not the technical term for a virgin (bethulah). This is best understood as the wife of Ahaz, the child promised will guarantee the dynasty is future (note again ‘the house of David’ in v. 13; cf. v. 2) and for this reason can be called Immanuel (‘with us is God‘) p. 235.

9. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 volume, 15,350 pages, 17,000 articles. McGraw-Hill, Catholic University of America. Imprimatur Patrick A. O’Boyle, Archbishop of Washington. Sponsored by the Bishops of the U.S. Dedicated to Pope Paul VI. (ed. A homosexual pope. See Randy Engel’s 1300 page The Rite of Sodomy). It is not necessary to believe that almah, in Isaiah 7:14 referred to Christ and Mary when it was first written (1-326).

Reviewed in the May 29, 1967 Lutheran News (now Christian News) and the April 6, 2009 Christian News). CN’s review of the New Catholic Encyclopedia may have been the most extensive critical review with many quotations published in any newspaper or theological journal. CN has found through the years that many scholars, including Roman Catholics, have never read it. CN showed that it presented “A New Faith” which is not historic Christianity. It should have been reviewed in every theological journal.

10. “What Does Almah Mean?” by William F. Beck, An American Translation of the Bible. Lutheran News, April 3, 1969. Concordia Seminary, St. Louis refused to publish this article. It is in the Christian Handbook on Vital Issues, pp. 537-548.

Beck begins by explaining the historical setting and what the sign is and then examines the meaning of almah.

“The etymological meaning of ALMAH is a sexually active girl.”

“1. Sound exegesis does not base the meaning of a word on the etymology. When a member of our class in Messianic Prophecy argued for the etymological meaning of almah, our Korean, Mr. Oh, asked him, ‘You say “teaspoon”, do you drink “tea” with it?’” (Dr. Oh and I were good friends in graduate school at Concordia Seminary. He visited us in New Haven, introduced me to professors at Covenant Seminary, and later became the president of what may have been the largest Presbyterian seminary in Korea. He earned his Th.D at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.)

“ALMAH occurs nine times in the Old Testament. In two places (Ps. 46:1; 1 Chron. 15:10), we have the plural alamoth”. Beck then examines each passage where almah is used and shows that this context indicates it must be translated “virgin.”

“But just as all the evidence dating almah as being a virgin, so there isn’t the least suggestion in Is. 7:14 that she is anything but that.”

“I have searched exhaustively for instances in which almah might mean a non-virgin or a married woman. There is no passage where almah is not a virgin. Nowhere in the Bible or elsewhere does almah mean anything but a virgin.”
Prior to the LCMS’ 1962 convention in Cleveland, an open hearing on doctrinal issues was held. Some 1400 attended. Many of the professors of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis who disagreed with Beck’s translation of almah were present at the hearing. I argued that every time almah is used in the Old Testament the context indicated it must be translated virgin. One of the professors said there was a passage in the Bible using almah where it does not mean virgin. I asked from the floor of the open hearing for the faculty to give the verse. He then told the open hearing that at the moment he could not supply the verse, but would do so later. The professor never did because there is no such verse where almah should not be translated “virgin.” This public confrontation did not improve my popularity with the seminary faculty.

Debate With Beck Declined
I tried to arrange a debate at the seminary between Beck and his critics on the faculty on such matters as the translation of almah, the J-E-D-P source hypothesis, Deutero-Isaiah, Beck’s translation, etc. Beck agreed to debate his critics on the faculty but they refused. Such a debate would have shown that Beck was by far the better combined Greek and Hebrew scholar and more familiar with the latest textual findings in Lutheranism than any of his critics.
Many have argued that if Isaiah had meant a “virgin” he would have used the Hebrew bethulah. Beck writes; “If Isaiah had used bethulah, those who want to have a young married woman could cite Joel 1:8 where bethulah is used of a woman who has had a “husband.”

“If almah means any married woman, there is no miracle and no prophecy of the virgin birth of God-with-us. Then Is. 7:14 has been watered down to fit any one of countless women giving birth to a child.”

Beck then examines other Semitic languages and the Septuagint. He wrote in this essay which every LCMS pastor should read:

Orlinsky calls the Septuagint “an authorized translation of the Bible into Greek, the work of Jewish scholars.”40 Their translation of Is. 7:14 is an excellent one. In this translation, two hundred years before Christ, long before the Jewish bias against Christ, “seventy” Jewish scholars translating for Jews, living twenty-two hundred years closer to ALMAH that we do, translated it with “virgin”, PARTHENOS. Whatever difficulties they may have experienced with the text and its historical setting, they were convinced that ALMAH means “virgin.” This PARTHENOS was kept in their Bible and read there by the Jews for three centuries. Not until 130 A.D., a hundred years after Christ, did they change it.

Matthew 1
If the virgin birth were a peripheral and insignificant element in Matthew 1, we might have to give some serious attention to those who claim that v. 23 is an inexact rendering of Is. 7:14. But the virgin birth is central and even pivotal in Matt. 1:16, 18-25. Matthew wants to tell his fellow Jews that Jesus was born of a virgin. That is the critical point of this event. Joseph was deeply troubled about Mary because he was convinced that she was guilty of adultery. What other explanation was there! Only one— a holy creation. To tell Joseph that, the angel had come down from heaven. “That which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit,” he says. There is nothing wrong with Mary. And more than that, the Lord has planned this. He predicted it in Is. 7:14: The ALMAH will conceive and bear a child. What the Lord said is now a concrete fact: Jesus is born of a virgin. Many a person may have puzzled about the ALMAH in Is. 7:14 (cp. 1 Pet. 1:10-12), but when Joseph, Luke, Matthew, and the other Apostles saw the historic fact, they understood Isaiah 7:14: Jesus was born of an ALMAH. The miracle of the ALMAH is given in Isaiah and made absolutely necessary by Isaiah; it is not added by Matthew.

Luther says,
If they make the claim that the Hebrew text does not state a VIRGIN is with child, but rather: an ALMAH is with child but ALMAH is not to supposed to mean Virgin but BETHULAH means a virgin, where ALMAH means a young maiden, . . . St. Matthew (1:22-23) and Luke (1:13), both of whom apply the passage in Isaiah to Mary and translate the world ALMAH “virgin,” whom we believe rather than the whole world. For God the Holy Spirit speaks through St. Matthew and St. Luke, of whom we firmly believe that He understands the Hebrew language and words.52

New Evidence
“The new evidence from Ras Shamra. . . Lends no support to those who claim that ALMAH may be used of a married woman.”

God-with-us
And so this God in God-with-us, on whom rests the Spirit of knowledge (11:2), will know by human experience. God-with-us eats curds and honey in order to learn how to reject the veil and choose the good. These words may have little meaning for those who switch off the light of the New Testament. But we should notice that the Messianic meaning is not imported from the New Testament and injected into a meaningless text; this is the simple meaning of the Hebrew text. Yet it matches the New Testament absolutely. In His training period when He ate curds and honey, God-with-us grew in wisdom (Luke 2:40, 52), by which He distinguished between good and bad, righteousness and sin, truth and falsehood. He did this for thirty years. His learning to reject the evil and choose the good is called a testing in Heb. 4:14, by which He is enabled to sympathize or “experience” (Cp. Gal. 3:4) with us. By His experience He learned obedience (Heb. 5:8, that is, the rejection of evil and the choice of the good. The goal of such training according to Hebrews (2:10; 5:8) was to be a perfect High Priest. The heart of His experience is given in Is. 53. According to verse 3 (where the Dead Sea scroll gives us the active participle of YADHA) He experiences pain for our sins. By His experience of our sin and its punishment, of righteousness and its attainment, He finished His work.

For entire article see Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 45, November 21, 2011