02 · That Young Woman

Sometime in the early-to-mid third century BCE, in Alexandria, a group of Jewish translators read the Hebrew word almah at Isaiah 7:14 and wrote it down in Greek as parthenos.

The two words do not contradict each other, and neither is a mistranslation of the other. What changed is the conclusion a reader was obliged to draw. The Hebrew obliged a conclusion about age. The Greek obliged something narrower. The gap between those two obligations is where two thousand years of doctrine came to sit.

The Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14, in the Masoretic Text, reads הָעַלְמָה (ha-almah) — "that young woman," in the sense of a woman of childbearing age. Scholarly consensus (Sweeney 1996, Coogan 2007) holds that almah marks age and "has nothing to do with virginity." Hebrew already had a specific word for a virgin: betulah. The writer of Isaiah did not reach for it.

That does not mean Isaiah was saying she was not a virgin. It means the sentence does not touch the question at all. almah leaves it open. A Hebrew reader could conclude either way; the text compels neither.

parthenos is narrower. The Septuagint — the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, made by Jews in Alexandria — chose a word meaning virgin. A young woman of childbearing age who has never married is an almah and a parthenos at the same time. So the Greek did not speak against the Hebrew. It closed a door the Hebrew had left open.

This is where the loss happens. A Hebrew reader was not obliged to conclude anything about virginity; a Greek reader could not avoid it. Nobody lied. No word went missing either. What went missing was the silence, and silence has nowhere to stand in a target language, because every word you pick up and put down obliges something. A translator chooses what to oblige. Obliging nothing at all is not one of the choices.

The scholarship does not agree here, and this book prints both sides. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible (Saldarini 2001, p. 1007) calls parthenos a mistranslation of almah, flatly. This book goes the other way. A mistranslation asserts what the source denies, and the Hebrew denies nothing at that point. So the real disagreement is over whether narrowing counts as an error, and that question is not closed.

The doctrinal weight came to rest on the Greek wording, not the Hebrew. Matthew 1:23 quotes the parthenos wording to present Jesus as born in fulfilment of the Isaiah prophecy, and Matthew 1:25 underlines that Joseph did not sleep with Mary before she gave birth. That is the textual basis of the Christian doctrine of a virgin birth.

The full Septuagint text read today does not come from the third century BCE. The oldest known Greek Bible manuscript before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found is Papyrus Rylands 458, a Pentateuch fragment, dated palaeographically to around the mid-second century BCE. The complete text survives to the present through three great uncial codices — Codex Vaticanus (4th century CE), Codex Sinaiticus (mid-4th century CE), and Codex Alexandrinus (5th century CE).

The account of who did the translating is later than the translation. The tradition descends from the Letter of Aristeas, which tells of seventy-two translators sent from Jerusalem, working in Alexandria under the Ptolemaic dynasty. But the Letter is itself a separate composition; most scholars date it to the second century BCE, later than the events it describes.

An Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that Simeon, one of the seventy translators, doubted the word parthenos and was told from above that he would not die until he saw it fulfilled. The story is used to explain Luke 2:26. This book's research file marks it explicitly as church tradition, not verifiable history, and this book prints it as that.

In 1952 the choice became a public argument again. The translators of the Revised Standard Version rendered almah as "young woman," and a controversy broke out among conservative American Christians. One pastor publicly burned a copy of the RSV (Metzger 2001, p. 120). No new manuscript. No new evidence. One English word had changed.

Translations are still split today. The versions widely used among evangelicals, NIV and ESV, keep "virgin"; most other modern translations use "young woman." The dispute is not about the Hebrew — both sides read the same word. It is about which obligation English is going to carry.

What this entry claims is narrow. It does not claim anyone mistranslated. It does not claim the doctrine is right or wrong. It claims that one Hebrew word left a question open, one Greek word closed it, and that a target language has no empty space for an open question. The translators in Alexandria in the third century BCE were not choosing between right and wrong. They were choosing between two obligations, and they had to choose.

What could not cross: The silence of almah could not cross. Hebrew already had betulah for a virgin and did not use it, so the text obliged a conclusion about age and left status blank. Greek had to pick a word that obliged something, and once it was picked, that blank no longer existed.

Overturned if: Someone shows the question of virginity was never open — either by showing that almah in Hebrew already obliged it, against Sweeney 1996 and Coogan 2007, or by showing that third-century BCE Greek had a word that obliged age alone and left status blank the way almah does, and that the translators passed it over. If such a word existed, parthenos was an option rather than an obligation, and this entry is wrong.

Sources: Isaiah 7:14 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_7:14 · Letter of Aristeas — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_Aristeas · Papyrus Rylands 458 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Rylands_458 · Codex Vaticanus — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Vaticanus · Codex Sinaiticus — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus (these pages are the source of every attribution carried in this entry — Sweeney 1996, Coogan 2007, Saldarini 2001 p. 1007 in the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, and Metzger 2001 p. 120; this book did not open those source volumes itself)