Prophecies are only real when the thing prophesied comes to pass in the life of the hearers and how could a child to be born 700 years later be a sign to Ahaz?! How can one prove a true prophet is you have to wait for hundreds of years to see if he is honest? This is clearly speaking of the child Isaiah and this Prophetess spawned. Isaiah tells Ahaz this is the sign yahweh will give him!!!! Think people and read for yourselves. Ahaz has two powerful armies coming after him and he needs help NOW not 700 years down the road when he is dead and rotted in his grave. What would you think if you were in dire straits, a matter of life or death and some religious lunatic told you that god was going to send you a sign and he would accomplish that sign a hundred years from now? What the hell kind of help would that be? You are still being lied to people and it is being done for a reason. Stop being sheeple.

Also, you can’t find a more vicious and bloodthirsty creature in the entire bible than yahweh. Any diety that condones the rape of little girls and forcing his own ‘chosen’ to eat their own children is not a god but a demon. History, even religious history, is written by the winners and the hebrews butchered and lied their way to that status. Nothing has changed.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your intentions are not apologetic (your blog, after all, professes to be stripped of theological systems). I’m guessing, therefore, that by “canon” you simply mean the stock of all texts written in Classical Hebrew, and are not actually restricting yourself to those that are theologically significant.

Whether or not this is an issue that gets trotted out every Christmas time or not is something that I don’t know (I live in Australia, and I don’t watch TV), but I’m prepared to take your word for that. I don’t really care: from what I’m given to understand, sensationalist biblical scholarship on television is pretty stupid anyway.

If alamot were always virgins then I agree with you completely: usage of the term would, by necessity, have to connote virginity as an attribute. I am not convinced, however, that alamot always were virgins and I fail to see how you’ve proved that here. You claim that ancient Israelite society was “a patriarchal culture, where women were isolated and their virginity guarded to the extreme”. On what basis are you claiming this? From scriptural quotes? They prove nothing, save what their authors envisaged or claimed. Given that there are no references to alamot that have to, in context, refer specifically and solely to virgins, I cannot agree with your conclusion, and am still unsure as to why you feel it needs to be drawn.

I repeat myself now: parthenos has a semantic range that embraces both “young girl” and “virgin” – like the English “maiden”, if we want a parallel. I don’t know why it’s necessary to insist on almah possessing the same semantic range but, if you want to do so, you’ll need a linguistic argument to convince me and not a social one. Or, failing that, some actual sociological evidence to back up your claim.

If you want to convince me that almah, in addition to denoting somebody who may happen to be a virgin, actually means virgin, then you’re going to need to do better than show me Songs 6:8, which may be referring to people who also happen to be virgins, but only through subjecting it to an exegetical reading. In the meantime, the Greek parthenos has a long history of being used both as “young girl” and as “virgin”.

With the greatest respect, I believe that you are mistaken. Esther 2:3 refers to virgins, but the fact that it also mentions the word betulah might indicate that na’arah by itself is insufficient to denote them. Even if na’arah did have that meaning, it still says nothing for almah which might be supposed to denote virgins in Songs 6:8, but might just as easily be denoting the second group of women described in Esther 2:14.

On the contrary, I think that the ambiguity resides in the Greek, parthenos. Like the English “maiden”, it has a semantic range that extends both to “virgin” and “young girl”. To suggest that Matthew might have erred seems a bit glib to me; there are enough stories of virgin births in the ancient world to dismiss the possibility that they derive from a faulty reading of Isaiah.