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”)”.
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.
