From: pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey)
Subject: Re: Almah in Isa 7: 14
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
Date: 7 Jan 1993 19:56:55 UTC

In article <141769.2B4B6601@paranet.FIDONET.ORG> 
Harvey.Smith@p0.f1.n7002.z8.FIDONET.ORG (Harvey Smith) writes:
>>> JL> why do so many Christian translations and commentaries 
>>> JL> accept "young woman" as the correct text and either reject 
>>> JL> or question "virgin?"
>Only in liberal non biblical churches Jack... Many have departed from the
>faith, no longer believing in the virgin birth, or the Scriptures as being 
>anything but the Word of God.

The logic is - fascinating.

> JL> context of your remarks? Are you excluding Roman Catholics,
> JL> Anglicans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, etc. etc. from your 
> JL> definition of Christians? Because translations officially 
> JL> adopted by all of those Churches accept "young woman" over 
> JL> "virgin." 
>The question is not whether the word alma means virgin  or young woman, 
>for it surely does mean young woman of marriageable age or betrothed to 
>be married, and in EVERY CASE in the Tanakh where the word is used, it 
>refers to a virgin, so it means a young maiden, who is a virgin, so the 
>Rabbinic translators who translated it in 300bce into greek meaning VIRGIN, 
>ie parthenos.... and correctly so.

A few points:
1. "In EVERY CASE in the Tanakh where the word is used, it *refers* to a
virgin" is *your* exegesis, not the *word*. No doubt like many Christians,
you have trouble separating exegesis from the actual written word. You
are free to speculate all you want, but the written word from the great
prophet Isaiah is almah, meaning clearly in modern English, young woman.
Isaiah did not use the Hebrew for virgin, no doubt for a reason. One
does not normally assume a young woman with child to be a virgin, it
seems fairly clear that if Isaiah was prophesying a virgin with child,
he would have used the Hebrew for virgin. In any case, the written word
is *not* the Hebrew for virgin. No doubt you will continue to see what you
want to see as oppossed to what is really there.
2. The Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek translation begun in the third
century BCE, was of course *not* of the Rabbinic tradition. Legend has it
that it was translated by six elders from each of the twelve tribes of
Israel, each translating separately and each arriving at the exact same
translation. Attractive legend, but. The truth is that the Septuagint is
a known flawed translation, a good example being the mistranslation of
the ten commandments where thou shalt not kill is incorrect and should
have been thou shalt not *murder*.

>Interesting that for centuries, it stood Virgin, and from the 9th century 
>to the 18th century in the Masoretic text it was always translated by the 
>Rabbis as "Virgin"... 

A few more points:
1. Judaism is the study of the Hebrew Scriptures in Biblical Hebrew.
Translations are not sacred.
2. Jews, Judaism and Jewish documents, including ancient Torah
manuscripts, have been persecuted and burned right up to the twentieth
century. The history of European Jewry is not a pleasant one. Attempting 
to point out the facts to European Christendom was a death wish. No doubt 
some tried. For some strange reason we have no record of them or their 
writtings.