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Hi Father, the word Almah has me very confused, it has so many meanings i.e virgin, a young woman of childbearing age etc, i read that even young girls who had given birth were still called almah until the child reached a certain age, if the child died the husband would divorce the girl as she couldn't give him a child and so the girl would keep her honour she was still known as an almah (virgin), if this is true all girls were virgins whilst they were pregnant at the time of Jesus's birth
Answer to Question 605 You are confused because you are reading into the explanations given for the Hebrew version of the Book of Isaiah where it uses the word almah meaning a young maiden instead of the word virgin. It might surprise you to know that the Hebrew version available today is not the original Hebrew and that the Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint version is much older. The Septuagint version is a translation made from the Hebrew into Greek and was translated by 72 Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, around 285 B.C. The 72 were made up by taking 6 scholars (scribes) from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. It became the most common used translation amongst the Jews outside of Palestine and the many references to the Old Testament prophecies found in the New Testament are quoted from the Septuagint version, showing that Christ and the Apostles considered it as the most authoritative and authentic.
In fact, at the time of Christ and the early Church, Hebrew had long since ceased to be the commonly spoken language, even among the Jews. Although Jesus understood Hebrew, He would have spoken Aramaic, the common language of Palestine, with His disciples. Jesus and His disciples were also familiar, with Greek, the common language of the Roman Empire. Greek was the most widely spoken and read language of the Empire at large, and that was why it was necessary for a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. The translation was made by Jews for Jews and not by Greeks, who as yet had no interest in the religious books of the Jews. But which of the two is actually the oldest? The Hebrew text at the time of Christ had been preserved by the rabbis and scribes of Israel. Those who read today about scriptural manuscripts will come across references made to the “masoretic” texts, which means the texts of the scribes (who were known as “masoretes”). In the first century, after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70AD, and the end of the Jewish priesthood, the authority of the rabbis in Israel became absolute. Before that time the rabbis occupied a position secondary to the priests. The rabbis and scribes distrusted anything that was not written in the traditional Hebrew language, and consequently they rejected the Septuagint text. But the actual Hebrew manuscripts which formed the basis for the Septuagint translation three centuries before Christ had been lost. The Orthodox Church believes that the Hebrew text upon which the Septuagint is based is actually older and more venerable than the Hebrew text of the scribes. Though both the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, are quite similar in many ways, there are significant differences. These differences can primarily be summed up by saying that the messianic prophecies (the prophecies concerning the Messiah) found throughout the Psalms and the prophetic writings are far more explicit in the Septuagint text than in the Masoretic text. A careful study of the Psalms will reveal how crucially different the Septuagint text is in these messianic portions. For the most part, translators during and after the Reformation, in an attempt to get back to what they thought were the roots of the Old Testament text, chose to use the Hebrew texts of the scribes and rejected the traditional use of the Septuagint. Therefore the Bibles most commonly available in English are translations of the Hebrew text of the scribes, not translations of the Septuagint which is older. The traditional text of the Orthodox Church, however, whether it be in her singing of the Psalms in worship, or her study of the Old Testament, is still the text of the early Church: the Septuagint. Thus there is no almah in Isaiah's text according to the Septuagint but virgin and this is how Matthew in the New Testament refers to Mary.
Same member So the word basically has been lost in translation and once again
Reply Not lost, The Jewish scribes used the Greek Septuagint to rewrite the Hebrew text and where they came across words or books that they found would discredit their own Jewish faith, they doctored the Old Testament accordingly in an attempt to give the new and growing Christian faith a false image. The Septuagint version has ten more books which the Scribes discarded when rewriting the Hebrew version, so the English translation which followed the new Hebrew version also has ten less books than the Greek Septuagint
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