On the road to Emmaus, Jesus explained to two disciples, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets… what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”
Those passages begin with Genesis 3, in which “the seed of the woman” would destroy the serpent but be injured in the process. Another of those key passages is Isaiah, foretelling the virgin birth – but obviously, today’s Jews do not believe that. Why not?
In fact there are many prophecies that the Jews do not think refer to Christ, and many others that they see Christ as having left unfulfilled.
Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 7 came in a specific moment, when the kings of Aram and Israel threatened to conquer Judah and set up their own puppet king, outside the line of David. Isaiah warns Ahaz, king of Judah, but tells him not to worry because the invasion will fail. Not only that, but soon both those kingdoms will be destroyed by Assyria. He tells Ahaz to ask for a sign, but Ahaz refuses – so God gives him one anyway.
That sign is that a particular alma or young woman – Isaiah’s wife, specifically – will bear a son, and while he is still young, the prophecy will be fulfilled. This then is fulfilled in chapter 8, when his wife bears a son who he gives a ridiculously long name.
This is the passage referred to in Matthew 1:23, in which the Greek word used is specifically about chaste/unmarried women. The Hebrew word, though, is generally used to mean any young woman, often but not exclusively a virgin per se. Many Jewish and other scholars see this as a mistranslation.
But prophecy is never as straightforward as it seems. Moses was promised the promised land, but not told about the 40 years in the desert. David was promised his family would hold the throne forever, but not told about the Babylonian Captivity or the hundreds of year gap between his kingly line and the birth of Christ, let alone the nature of Christ’s fulfillment of that prophecy.
The prophecies of the Old Testament are often fulfilled by what is called a “dual fulfillment” – a concrete, political fulfillment in the Old Testament, and a universal, spiritual fulfillment in the New.
And it is the latter that matters, because the deeper promise of the prophecy is not the part about the virgin, but the part about “Immanuel”. God with us, in the person of Christ, incarnate and so with us in the
Ultimately, Matthew got it right – the man who called him out of his life as a tax collector, into new life as a servant of God, the man who he desperately wanted to be seen and accepted by his Jewish brothers and sisters – he was born of a virgin, and himself was Immanuel.
– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, November 29, 2020