Almah

Almah means “a maiden,” or “an unmarried woman” in Hebrew. It appears in a few places in the Tanach. Two are of special interest to me. The is first mentioned in the Tanach in this week’s Parashah (Genesis 24). The other, in the Book of Isaiah (7, 14).

Had the discussion over the use of the term in Isaiah not surfaced in a past exchange that I had, the one in this week’s Parashah would have gone unnoticed by me and this essay not written. So, let me get right to it.

About twenty years ago, a fellow Jew, who embraced Yeshua (AKA Jesus) as his messiah, and I were debating the issue. When I asked him what convinced him to make that decision, he directed me to the said verse in Isaiah. Someone, sometime, somewhere, so it seemed, tried and evidently succeeded to mislead him by telling him that the verse in question is a prediction of the birth of Jesus whom we, Jews, rejected as our messiah. For those who are unfamiliar with that specific verse, here It is: “Therefor the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’ and shall call his name Immanuel.”

It includes, so it seems, G-d, a virgin and a son, all the essential elements needed to persuade simple, uneducated and baffled Jews that it referred to Jesus.  Not so fast, I say. As a native Hebrew speaker, I hated to burst his bubble of belief in a comforting and rewarding way of life which shakes any form of personal responsibility off us. And what a better way to convince the gullible, naïve souls seeking redemption than to use a mistranslation of the Hebrew language, deliberate or otherwise, to please the perplexed?

The Hebrew word for virgin is betulah. If Isaiah had indeed intended to impress upon us that he was prophesying the immaculate conception, would he, a speaker of Hebrew, not used “betulah” instead of “almah?”

“But hey,” retorted my devout “Jew for Jesus” challenger, “were not all maidens, during Biblical era, expected to be virgins?” A valid argument, one would suggest.

It is on occasions such as this that I enlist the help of a publication called “Bible Concordance,” a verbal index to the Bible. It lists every word that appears in the Tanach and cites it. Since my challenger suggested that a Biblical maiden had to be a virgin, I looked up the references to a “maiden’ and the context in which they were used.  “Maiden” appears seven times in the Tanach.

 The first one appears in this Parashah (Genesis 24:43) where Eliezer, the servant of Avraham describes Rivkah, the future wife of Yitzchak, as a maiden, “See, I am standing beside this spring. If a maiden comes out to draw water and I say to her, “’Please let me drink a little water from your jar.’” In that same chapter, verse 17, Rivkah is described as a “Virgin,” betulah “that no man knew” (and we all know what “to know” means in the Biblical sense).

The question that is begging to be asked is, if indeed it was so clear that in Biblical times, almah was akin to betulah, why was there a need to reiterate it in the case of Rivkah? Evidently, it was not that obvious.

Another question that is begging to be asked is, how did the Hebrew almah become “virgin” in the English translation of Isaiah?

That has everything to do with the Greek translation of the Tanach, a translation, which as I have shown in the past, has caused us, Jews, and our Tanach much damage.

It all started in the third century B.C.E. with the Greek ruler, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the king of Ptolemic Egypt. An educated man, Ptolemy wished to augment his library in Alexandria and commissioned seventy-two (six from each of the twelve tribes) scholars to translate the Torah and later the rest of the Tanach into Greek. This translation came to be known as “The Septuagint” (Seventy in Latin). The main reason for producing the translation was for the benefit of the many Jews who were scattered throughout the Greek Empire and who were beginning to lose their Hebrew language. The translation also gave many non - Jews an opportunity to have a glimpse at the Hebrew Scriptures. Apparently, a noble cause but, as you will soon learn, dear readers, a great reason for alarm.

In Greek, the word Parthenos means BOTH “maiden” and “virgin.” Isn’t it natural, therefore, that to make their case for the immaculate conception, early Christianity conveniently chose the word virgin instead of the original Hebrew word for maiden?

Wishing my fellow Jews Shabbat Shalom, a meaningful Thanksgiving celebration to my fellow Americans and a weekend full of blessings to all.