How Did ISAIAH Know About JESUS’ BIRTH and DEATH 700 YEARS Before They Happened?

How Did ISAIAH Know About JESUS’ BIRTH and DEATH 700 YEARS Before They Happened?

Isaiah did not write the word virgin. Hebrew has that word. Isaiah knew it. He used it in other places in his own book and in the most famous line he ever wrote. The one millions of people read every December. The one that appears on cards, in sermons, in songs, in plastic nativity scenes. He didn’t use it. He wrote something else. And that choice is the reason Jews and Christians have been arguing over this same passage for 20 centuries without either side moving an inch. I want you to know

something before we go any further. Because if I don’t say it now, you’re going to think this video is headed somewhere it’s not. I’m not here to tear anything down. I’m here to show you what the text says in its original language. No makeup, no decorations. Know that common trick of hiding the uncomfortable detail under the rug and hoping nobody lifts the rug because what’s under that rug is stranger, harder to explain, and honestly more impressive than the pretty version. The Hebrew term Isaiah wrote is Alma, and Alma does not

mean virgin in a technical sense. It means a young woman, a girl of marriageable age, a young woman. The term that specifically points to virginity, the one used when legal precision is needed, when there’s a dowy involved, when there’s a trial, when there’s an accusation to prove, is betula. Isaiah had betula available. He didn’t write it. And this is where I need to ask you a favor because from here on things get dense and I don’t want to lose you. Leave me a single word in the

comments. the one that came to your mind when you read that 3 seconds ago. Suspicion, discomfort, curiosity, whatever it was. I read them all. And I want to know exactly where in this video you’re standing right now. Because 200 years before Jesus was born in a city in Egypt, a group of Jews translating this same line into Greek arrived at the word Alma, stopped and chose a Greek word that does mean virgin. They were not Christians. Christianity didn’t exist. There were two centuries still to go. Nobody forced

them. Nobody was watching them. They had no motive to force anything. And yet they chose that word. We’re going to get to why. I promise we’re going to get to why. And when we do, you’ll understand that the answer is not what you’ve been told. But for that to mean anything, you first need to understand where Isaiah was standing the day he opened his mouth and said that sentence because the place matters. The date matters. And most of all, it matters who he was talking to. We’re around the year 735 BC. Jerusalem,

the kingdom of Judah. Judah was the southern half of what had been the kingdom of Israel before it split in two after Solomon’s death. The northern half kept the name Israel and most of the territory. The southern half kept Jerusalem, the temple, and something that at the time seemed less important than it was. It kept the family of David. The king at that moment was named Aaz. And Aaz was terrified. To the north, the king of Israel, a man named Pekka, had formed a military alliance with Resin, king of Syria. The two of

them were marching south toward Jerusalem with a concrete plan. And the plan wasn’t to sack the city. The plan was to remove Ahaz from the throne and put in his place a man the biblical text doesn’t even grant a proper name. It calls him the son of Tabil. That’s in chapter 7 of Isaiah verse 6. A nobody, a puppet, someone who would govern Jerusalem doing whatever Damascus and Samaria told him to do. And here is what almost nobody explains when they tell this story. That wasn’t just a coup. It was the end of the line

of David. Because nearly 300 years earlier, a prophet named Nathan had told David that God was going to establish a throne that would last forever. That’s in 2 Samuel 7. And for 300 years, that promise had passed from father to son within a single family in a single city like a flame someone has to keep lit even when it’s raining outside. If the son of Tibil sat on that throne, the flame went out. Imagine the palace in those days. And I want to be clear, this is not written in the Bible. This is a reconstruction. A scene that probably

looked something like this, but that I cannot prove. Advisor coming and going, maps on the table, messengers arriving from the north with news that got worse every day, officials calculating how many days of food were left if a siege came, and a young king who had inherited a 300-year-old promise and was about to be the man who lost it. What the text does say is a single sentence, and it’s one of the most physical sentences in all of the Old Testament. It says that the heart of Ahazars and the heart of his people trembled as the

trees of the forest trembled before the wind. It doesn’t say they were afraid. It says they shook the way an entire forest shakes. And it’s at that moment with the city shaking that God sends Isaiah to speak to the king. And the text takes the trouble to tell you exactly where. Not in the temple, not in the throne room, at the aqueduct of the upper pool, on the road to the Fuller’s Field. Notice what a strange detail that is to put in a prophecy, a water channel, a road where people washed clothes. Why is it there?

Because when an army came to besiege an ancient city, the first thing it did wasn’t attack the wall. It was to cut off the water. And the first thing the besieged city did was go and check its water sources. Aaz wasn’t taking a walk. Aaz was inspecting Jerusalem’s water system, calculating how many weeks the city could hold out before dying of thirst. So when Isaiah appears before him, he finds him in the exact place where a city’s fear is measured. He doesn’t find him praying. He finds him running survival calculations. And God

tells Isaiah to bring his son. The boy’s name was Shia Jashub. And that name in Hebrew means a remnant will return. Think about what it means to stand before a terrified king while holding a child by the hand whose name is a walking announcement. Every time someone called that child for dinner, they were saying a prophecy out loud. A remnant will return, which means two things at once, and both of them hurt. There will be destruction because if only a remnant returns then the rest was lost. And there will be survival because a remnant

is more than nothing. Isaiah didn’t arrive with a speech. He arrived with a child who was the speech. The message Isaiah brings the king is short and concrete. He tells him not to be afraid. He tells him those two kings marching down against him are literally two smoldering stumps of firewood. Two burned sticks that have no more fire, just smoke. He tells him that very soon both of them will be finished. And then something happens that I hadn’t fully understood until I sat down to read it in Hebrew. And it’s the detail

that gives meaning to everything else. God offers the king a sign. He says literally, “Ask for yourself a sign. Ask it as low as the depths below or ask it as high as the heights above. Whatever you want, you choose.” It’s an open offer. A terrified king has before him an open account and is being told to ask for whatever he can think of. And Aaz says, “No.” He says, and this is in verse 12, “I will not ask and I will not put the Lord to the test.” It sounds pious. It sounds humble. A king saying he’s not going to go around testing God.

And it’s a lie. It’s a lie because the same biblical text a few chapters later and also 2 Kings chapter 16 tells us what Aaz was doing while he said that pretty sentence. He was sending the gold and silver from the temple in Jerusalem to the king of Assyria to buy military protection. He had already chosen. He already had a plan. His plan was the most brutal empire of the moment. And a divine sign at that instant was not helpful to him. It was in the way. It wasn’t humility. It was a man who had

already decided not to trust and needed a religious phrase to cover the decision. And here comes the grammatical detail that changes the meaning of the entire passage. one that is almost always lost in translation. When God offers the sign in verse 11, the Hebrew is in singular, ask for yourself, one person, the king. When Isaiah responds after the refusal in verse 13, it changes. He says, “Here now, house of David.” And from there on, all the Hebrew goes to plural. It no longer says, “He will give you.” It says

he will give you all. So the recipient of the prophecy changes in the middle of the conversation. Aaz rejected the sign and the sign stopped being his. It stopped being for one king and became for an entire dynasty, for the whole house of David, those who were alive that day and those who had not yet been born. That shift is not my interpretation. It’s in the grammar. And to me, it seems like the key to everything that follows because it explains why a sign that apparently was for a moment of crisis in the 8th

century BC ends up pointing towards something much further away than could fit within Ahaz’s lifetime. And then Isaiah says the sentence, “Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the Alma will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call his name Emmanuel. Isaiah 7:14. Now, let’s open that word because 20 centuries of argument fit inside five Hebrew letters. Alma appears seven times in the entire Hebrew Bible. Seven. It’s a rare term. It appears when Abraham’s servant is looking for a wife

for Isaac and finds Rebecca at the well. That’s in Genesis 24:43. It appears when Moses’s sister is hidden in the reeds watching her brother’s basket in Exodus 2. It appears in a psalm in a procession of musicians. It appears in Proverbs in a sentence about things that leave no trace. And it appears twice in the Song of Songs. And here is where I have to be honest with you. even if it’s uncomfortable because there are channels that at this point would tell you that in all seven appearances the word means

virgin and that’s that and that’s not true. What those seven appearances have in common is not virginity. It’s age and social situation. An Alma is a young woman unmarried of marriageable age but not yet married. In none of those seven texts does the writer stop to tell you that woman had never been with a man. That’s not the point the text is interested in. Now, and this is what almost nobody tells you because it sinks the other side’s argument with equal ease. The word batula, the one that supposedly does mean virgin with

technical precision. The one Aaz was supposedly supposed to have used and didn’t, isn’t clean either. Go to the prophet Joel chapter 1:8. There’s a bachelor there. And that Bulla is mourning for the husband of her youth. She has a husband. She’s a widow. If Betula meant virgin in a technical and absolute sense, that sentence would be nonsense. And it’s not nonsense. It’s normal Hebrew. So stop with me for a moment because this is the point neither side wants to say out loud. So virgin or young woman? Young woman. That’s the

direct answer without detours. What Isaiah wrote means young woman. But if you stop at just that, you’re leaving with half the picture because the other half is that the language didn’t have a way to say the opposite either. Biblical Hebrew does not have a clean technical word for virgin. It doesn’t. Neither alma nor betula work the way our modern concept does. When Hebrew needs to be unambiguous, it doesn’t use a single term. It uses a whole phrase. It says who has not known a man. It says it with all its

letters because it knows one word alone is not enough. And that means the 20th century argument over whether Alma means virgin or doesn’t mean virgin is wrongheaded from the start. Both sides are fighting over a precision the language never had. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “I just dismantled the entire argument and now there’s nothing left.” Hold on because what’s left is stranger because there’s a second problem in that line and it’s bigger than the first. The problem of the verb tense in English you

read the virgin will conceive and give birth. Pure future something that’s going to happen. Hebrew doesn’t say that. Hebrew says he alma harveled ben har is not a future tense verb. It’s an adjective. It means pregnant. It’s the word you’d use to describe a woman who is pregnant right now. And yoltet is not a future tense verb either. It’s an active participle. It means giving birth. It’s the form that describes an action in progress. So, the most natural reading of the Hebrew, the one you’d get

if you gave that line to someone who knows nothing about theology and only knows Hebrew, is this look, the young woman is pregnant and is giving birth to a son present right there before Aaz’s eyes. That is exactly the reading the Jewish tradition defends. And I want you to understand that it doesn’t defend it out of stubbornness or bias. It defends it because the grammar gives it to them and it gains strength when you see what happens in the next chapter. Because in Isaiah 8:es 3 and 4, the prophet has a son with his

wife whom the text calls the prophetus. The boy receives another impossible name, Maher Shalal Hashbaz, meaning something like quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil. And God says that before that boy knows how to say mommy and daddy, the two kingdoms that were threatening Judah will be destroyed. It’s the same structure, a child with a symbolic name, a deadline measured in that child’s infancy, a concrete political crisis. And historically, it happened. Damascus fell to Assyria in 732 BC. Samaria

fell in 7:22 within the deadline. So the honest question, the one that has to be asked headon is this. If the sign was for Ahaz in his time, for his crisis, for his fear, how can a sign for him be something that happens 700 years later? What use is it to a man counting water barrels to have a baby born 30 generations after he’s dead? That objection is serious. It’s the best argument the other side has. And anyone who hides it from you isn’t teaching you. They’re selling you something. If at this point you feel the floor

shifting a little under you, write me a single letter in the comments. An A if you want me to keep going even when it’s uncomfortable. A B if you’d rather I stay on the surface. I’m going to keep going either way, but I want to know who I’m talking to. Now, let me tell you what happened when the rabbis themselves tried to resolve this passage on their own. No Christians in the room debating among themselves because the most obvious solution, the one anyone would propose is to say the Alma was Aaz’s wife and the baby was his son Hezekiah

who did end up being a good king, one of the best Judah ever had. Clean, tidy, problem solved. Rashi who is probably the most influential Jewish commentator of all time from the 11th century sat down to run the numbers and the numbers didn’t work out. Rashi calculated the ages from the data in the book of kings and concluded that Hezekia had already been born 9 years before Ahaz came to the throne. So when Isaiah gave the prophecy, Hezekiah was already walking around the palace. You can’t announce as a future sign the birth of a child who

was already born. And notice carefully what I’m saying because I don’t want you to misread me. Rashi did not conclude that the text spoke of Jesus. On the contrary, Rashi proposed that the child was the son of the prophetess, the one in chapter 8. He closes one door and opens another, but he closed the most popular door and he closed it from the inside. And now let’s go back to Egypt because I owe you an answer from 20 minutes ago. Alexandria around the 2n century BC. The largest Jewish community outside the land of Israel. Hundreds of

thousands of people who already grew up speaking Greek, who dreamed in Greek, who prayed in Greek, and who were losing access to their own scriptures because Hebrew was slipping through their fingers. So they began to translate first the Torah, then the prophets. That enormous work done by different generations of translators is what we call today the Septuagent. And when the translator of Isaiah arrived at chapter 7:14, he encountered Alma and had to decide how to render it in Greek. He chose Pathnos. Now, here’s

where I need to give you the uncomfortable fact before the good one. Because if I only give you the good one, I’m manipulating you. Pthanos isn’t a perfectly clean technical term either. In Genesis 34, the same septuagent uses Pathnos to refer to Dina, Jacob’s daughter, after Sheckchham violated her after. So there the term is functioning as young woman, not as a description of that woman’s physical state. And there’s more. Of the seven times Alma appears in the Hebrew, the Septuagent translates it as Parthonos in only two

places. In the other five, it uses other words, Naanis, which simply means young girl. So, it can’t be claimed that Pathnus always means virgin. That’s not true. And now listen carefully because this is what I wanted to tell you from the beginning of the video. That uncomfortable fact doesn’t destroy the argument. It makes it much stronger. Because if Pathnos were the automatic translation of Alma, if it were what comes out every time Alma appears, then the choice in Isaiah 7:14 would mean absolutely nothing. It would be a

reflex, a key pressed automatically. But it’s not automatic. The same translators in the same scrolls wrote something else five times out of seven. So someone in Alexandria 200 years before Jesus was born with no idea that something called Christianity was going to exist arrived at that specific line. Stopped looked at what it said and decided that in that specific line and not the other five the stronger term belonged. That’s no longer translation. That’s reading. That man understood that line was saying

something the others weren’t saying, and he was not a Christian, and he couldn’t be. And now I want to take you to a cave. The year 1947, the Judeian desert near the Dead Sea. A Bedin shepherd looking for a lost goat throws a rock into a cave and hears something that doesn’t sound like a rock. It sounds like breaking pottery. Inside there were jars and inside the jars there were scrolls. One of those manuscripts was the complete book of Isaiah. All 66 chapters, 7 m and 34 cm long, 54 columns of text,

17 sheets of leather sewn together. Today it’s in Jerusalem in a building shaped like a jar lid called the Shrine of the Book. And it’s dated to around 125 BC. That is more than a century before Jesus was born and a thousand years older than the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript we had before that lost goat. Now I’m going to tell you what’s said about that manuscript and then I’ll tell you what it actually is because those aren’t the same thing and the difference is the best argument in this video. What’s repeated

everywhere is that that parchment is identical word for word to the text you have in your Bible today. that the scribes counted every letter one by one, that they verified the middle letter of each page, that if they found a single error, they threw the entire parchment in the trash and started over. You’ve heard that. I heard it many times, and I repeated it. It’s not true. Those rules about counting letters and discarding parchments exist. They’re real, and they’re fascinating. But they’re the rules of the maseretses.

Jewish scribes who worked between the 6th and 10th centuries AD, and they applied mainly to Torah scrolls. We’re talking about people who lived a thousand years after this copy of Isaiah was made. The Kumran scribe didn’t work that way. Donald Perry, who spent his career cataloging the differences in that scroll column by column, describes the copiest with a word that’s going to hurt a lot of people. Free. a scribe with a free approach to the text. He added clarifications. He updated words that already sounded old. He harmonized

similar lines. He corrected on the fly. And you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it because the manuscript can be seen. It’s been digitized. It has corrections between lines, crossed out letters, words added above in small handwriting, exactly like someone’s notebook when they’re actually working. In 2021, a team from the University of Groingan applied artificial intelligence to the handwriting analysis and published something human eyes had been debating for 70 years without resolving. That parchment was not written by one

person. It was written by two. There is a change of hand toward the middle of the manuscript. And the differences from the text you have in your Bible are not four typos. There are more than 2,600 variants. There’s a section of chapter 2 that simply is not in that copy. It’s missing. So, if you’re waiting for me to tell you that discovery proves the Bible was copied perfectly for a thousand years, I’m not going to say that because it’s not true. And you deserve better than an argument that collapses

with 2 minutes of searching. I’m going to tell you something much more interesting. Imagine that man. And again, this is reconstruction. This isn’t written anywhere. A guy sitting in the desert with heat, with poor light, copying an extremely long book that will take him months, knowing that nobody will probably ever thank him. At some point, he makes a mistake. He adds an extra word and instead of throwing months of work in the trash, he does what anyone would do, crosses it out, writes the correct one above, and

keeps going. That man was not a precision machine. He was a tired human being doing his work as best he could. And because of that, exactly because of that, what I’m about to tell you matters. Let’s go to Isaiah 7:14 in that manuscript. The line we’ve been talking about the whole video. It has three differences from the text you have in your Bible. The first where your Bible says Lord. The Kuman text has God’s proper name. The second where your Bible writes Emanuel as two separate words with us God. The manuscript writes

it together as one word like a person’s name. And the third is the one that made me go quiet for a moment when I saw it. Your Bible says, “And she will call his name Emmanuel.” and that she will call in the Maseretic Hebrew is in feminine singular. She will call. The mother names him. The Dead Sea text doesn’t say that. It has a shorter form without that final letter that reads in masculine. He will call not the mother. Now stay with me because here’s something I thought I had understood and I hadn’t. Open the Gospel

of Matthew 1 verse 23. where this line is cited and they will call his name Emmanuel. They will call third person plural. And I’m going to say it to you exactly as it is. Even though it leaves me without the nice ending I had prepared for this part. Matthew agrees with nobody. He doesn’t agree with the standard Hebrew text which says she. He doesn’t agree with the Dead Sea Scroll which says he. and he doesn’t agree with the Greek translation circulating in his time which says you all three disagree

with each other but all three are singular. Matthew is the only one who puts it in plural. I was about to tell you this a different way. I was about to tell you Matthew agreed with the Kumran manuscript against the surviving text because it sounds spectacular and because there are people who tell it that way. I went to check it and it’s not true. I’d rather lose the dramatic moment than win it by lying to you. But notice what does remain because something does remain. And it’s stranger than what I was going

to tell you. Of that entire line, the only thing the ancient witnesses can’t agree on is who gives the child his name. That there’s a young woman. They agree that she’s pregnant. They agree that a son is born. They agree that that son is called God with us. They all agree without a single exception across more than a thousand years of handwritten copies. The only thing that moves is who names him. She, he, you. And Matthew, writing in Greek decades later for people who had already seen how the story ended,

doesn’t choose any of the three. He writes they. Not the mother, not the father, not the king, the people. And that’s not a copiest error. It’s a decision. And now think about what it all means together. Because here’s where the argument turns itself around. That manuscript has errors. It has corrections. It has two different hands. It’s missing a piece of chapter 2. It’s human from top to bottom. And yet in the most disputed passage in the entire book, the one someone would have had the most

reason to touch. The line that 20 centuries of argument were going to turn into a battlefield. There it is written, unretouched, unpolished, not adjusted. If someone had wanted to fabricate this prophecy after Jesus to make it fit, that parchment wouldn’t exist. Or it would exist with the line doctorred. And if someone had wanted to erase it, it wouldn’t exist either. What we have is an imperfect text. copied by tired hands that reached us with its scars intact.

And the scars are the proof because a document without scars is a document someone touched. And there’s still the most important word in the entire prophecy. And it’s not Alma, it’s the name Emmanuel in Hebrew, Emmanuel, with us God. There’s an idea that circulates widely and sounds beautiful. That that name was theologically impossible. That no Jewish father would dare give it to an ordinary baby. That no normal child could carry such a thing. And it’s false. The Hebrews gave names like that all the time. Their way of naming children was practically a system for inserting

theological phrases into a person. Isaiah himself means the Lord saves. Ezekiel means God strengthens. Elijah means my God is the Lord. And in Proverbs chapter 30, there’s a man, a certain whose name literally means God is with me. Nobody ever thought was divine. He was a man with a nice name. So if someone tells you the name Emmanuel by itself proves something, they’re not lying out of malice. But they didn’t check their sources. And now that I’ve taken that away from you, let me give you what there

actually is. Because what there is is much stranger. And almost nobody tells it. And I hadn’t seen it until I sat down to read chapters 7 8 and 9 straight through without stopping the way they were originally read as a single block. Emmanuel doesn’t appear once in Isaiah. It appears three times. The first is the one you already know in chapter 7. The second is in chapter 8:8. And it’s a violent image. Isaiah is describing the Assyrian invasion coming. And he describes it as a river that overflows and enters Judah, rising and

rising up to the neck, and says that that river spreading its wings will fill the breadth of your land. And there at the end of the line, without any preparation, without explanation, the prophet turns and speaks directly to someone. Oh Emmanuel, stop there. Because that’s very strange. Isaiah is talking about the land of Judah. And in the moment of saying your land, he doesn’t address King Aaz, who is the living king, the one sitting on the throne, the legal owner of that land. He addresses a baby who has not yet been

born. and he tells him the land is his. The third appearance is two verses later in chapter 8 10 and there it’s no longer a name. It’s a battle cry. Isaiah challenges the nations gathering against Judah and tells them to make their plans to gather and conspire all they want that it won’t do any good and ends with two words Imanu l with us God. So in the span of three chapters that word is first the name of a child then the owner of a country then a war cry and it doesn’t stop there because a few lines later now in chapter 9 Isaiah speaks

again of a child and this time gives him titles he gave to no other human being in all his book. He says, “A child is born to us, a son is given to us, and he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace, and that he will reign on the throne of David forever.” There’s no longer any vocabulary ambiguity to debate. There’s no Hebrew word with a disputed translation. There it says, “Mighty God, Elgibore.” And it’s the same term Isaiah uses to refer to God in chapter 10. And

now I want you to realize what we’re looking at. If the child of chapter 7 and the child of chapter 9 are the same child, then the vocabulary problem becomes secondary. And I want to tell you where that reading comes from because I didn’t invent it. There’s a line of scholarship coming from the 19th century and still alive that treats these chapters as a block composed in one piece, usually called the book of Emanuel. Not everyone accepts it, but it’s not something a YouTube channel made up because it no longer matters as much

whether Alma means virgin or young woman. What matters is that the creature announced in that block owns the land before being born and ends up with titles no Jew of the 8th century BC would have given to a human being. And I want to be fair because this channel is not here to cheat. There are scholars who read that o emanuel of chapter 8 as a rhetorical figure a vocative addressed to the land itself or to the community not to a person. It’s a legitimate reading. I can’t rule it out. But even that reading has to explain why

the name of that baby became in three chapters the way of saying the land is not alone. And there’s one more thing I want to correct because you’re going to hear it a lot. You’re going to hear that non-Christian historians like Josephus and Tacitus confirm this prophecy. They don’t confirm it. Tacitus in his annals mentions that a certain Christ was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. That’s all. And even so, it’s valuable because it’s a hostile Roman taking it for granted that that man

existed and died that way. Josephus is more complicated. The long paragraph where he speaks of Jesus is one of the most debated texts of antiquity because almost all specialists including Christian ones accept that later Christian hands inserted phrases into it. The mention that is accepted with far less dispute is another shorter one where he refers in passing to James, the brother of Jesus called Christ. But notice carefully what neither of them says. Neither one mentions Isaiah. Neither one mentions the prophecy.

Neither one mentions a birth. What they confirm is that there was a man and that that man was executed. They don’t confirm what that man meant. And I prefer to tell you that directly even though it’s less spectacular because if I sell you Tacitus as a witness to the prophecy and tomorrow someone opens the annals and sees nothing of that there, I don’t just lose an argument. I lose your trust. Now what is Matthew actually doing when he cites that passage? Because here too we have to be careful. Matthew writes decades after the events. He writes