Isaiah's Messianic Prophecies

Around 734 to 732 BCE, with Judah under threat from an alliance of Israel and Aram-Damascus, Isaiah tells King Ahaz that God will give him a sign: a young woman is with child and will bear a son to be called Immanuel, "God with us," and before the boy is old enough to know good from evil, the land of the two kings Ahaz fears will be deserted. Read in its own setting, the sign is dated to Ahaz's own crisis and resolved within a few years of it, not centuries later.

The Hebrew word translated "young woman," almah, denotes a woman of childbearing age and does not itself specify virginity, unlike the more specific Hebrew word betulah. The Greek Septuagint translation, made some centuries before Jesus's birth, rendered almah with parthenos, a word that does carry the sense of virgin, and Matthew's Gospel cites this Greek wording directly, stating that Jesus's virgin birth fulfilled it. Jewish tradition, working from the Hebrew text and the passage's own historical frame, has read the child differently, in various interpretations as Ahaz's own son and successor Hezekiah or simply an unnamed child of Isaiah's own generation, with the sign's force resting on its short-term timing rather than on the child's identity as such.

Sources The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors) with When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian BibleTimothy Michael Law, The New Testament, Gospel of MatthewAnonymous

A set of passages usually called the Servant Songs, Isaiah 53 chief among them, describe a figure who is despised and rejected, "wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities," whose suffering is somehow borne on behalf of others. The earliest Christian writing already applies this directly to Jesus: Acts has Philip explain the passage to an Ethiopian official by preaching Jesus from it, and the reading of Isaiah 53 as a messianic prophecy fulfilled in the crucifixion has remained continuous in Christian tradition since.

The dominant reading in rabbinic Judaism identifies the servant collectively as the nation of Israel, suffering among the nations for its faithfulness, an interpretation with roots stretching back near the origin of the debate itself. It is not, however, the only Jewish reading on record: a minority of medieval and modern Jewish commentators, among them the fourteenth century Rabbi Moshe Kohen ibn Crispin of Cordova, argued for an individual referent, though not for Jesus specifically, and criticised the corporate reading as a departure from the passage's plain sense. Both the collective and the individual non-Christian readings agree in rejecting the specifically Christian identification, while disagreeing with each other about what the alternative is.

Sources The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors) with The New Testament, Acts of the ApostlesAnonymous