Orthodox Reflections

— Augustine Martin

Shalom lachem, as Joseph said to his brothers in Genesis 43:23, the only usage of the phrase in the Hebrew text, somewhat different from the more iconic greeting that emerged in the Talmud and among the Ashkenazi Jews. Likely it’s also what Jesus said in John 20:19.

Isaiah 7:14 is a famously contested verse, quoted in Matthew 1:23, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. [KJV] Only Jesus could fulfill this prophecy, that a woman who never had carnal love could produce a child. Surely such an impossibility would mean that this child would be a miracle from God.

The Jews claim that this word “virgin” actually just means “young woman” and that this prophecy was fulfilled just a little further down the text in chapter 8:3-4:

And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria. [KJV]

And the Christians respond that prophecy usually has multiple layers, or that this next verse doesn’t refer to the first verse, or that it’s no prophecy at all for a young woman to give birth. Infamously the RSV changed this verse to align with the Jewish understanding, and then fundamentalists started burning the RSV, and the translators compared themselves to William Tyndale, who was strangled and then burned at the stake for producing bad translations that taught heresy. The circle continues.

Orthodox Christians in particular point to the value of the Septuagint. The 70 translators knew that the word meant “virgin”. Simeon the God-receiver was such a translator, and he had been cursed (or blessed?) to live until he saw the prophecy fulfilled as punishment for trying to change the text to “young woman” [Luke 1:25-26]. And so you have to read the Septuagint to understand this verse, and the Hebrew Masoretic is of no value at all. The Jews intentionally changed the word to make the text less Messianic, and so the Hebrew text is completely useless and corrupt.

That’s what your priest told you in catechism, and he was wrong. Let’s talk about it.

People who say these things have read very little of the Old Testament. They probably do not know Greek and certainly not Hebrew. Likely they have not read much of the Church Fathers either. I am no philo-semite, but the one thing I will defend the God-hating Jews on is the ridiculous accusation that they intentionally corrupted the Masoretic. The interpretation and vowel dots are rooted in the rabbinical tradition, and that itself is untrustworthy, but they did not change the original 22 letters to make the text less Messianic.

First of all, as far as I’m aware, the only Church Father who ever said that the Jews corrupted the Hebrew text was Justin Martyr. If the Jews were trying to make the text less Messianic, then they did a really terrible job. It even contains Messianic prophecies not found in the Septuagint [Job 19:25-27, Jeremiah 33]. The Masoretic of Isaiah 9:6 refers to the Messiah as “Everlasting Father”, something absent in all scholarly editions of the Septuagint but present in the Church of Greece text. If the Jews wanted to make the Old Testament not refer to Jesus, then they should have taken out the part where the Son is identified with the Father.

Second, the Dead Sea Scrolls effectively proved that the Masoretic and Septuagint are just different strains of the same text. In Cave Four, we found three copies of Jeremiah in Hebrew – two aligned with the Masoretic, but one aligned with the Septuagint. So the Septuagint translators preserved one version of the text, and the rabbinical Jews preserved a different version. Usually the DSS agrees with the MT, but occasionally it agrees with LXX, and sometimes it does something else entirely.

I am not aware of any Church Father who explicitly rejected the Hebrew text, and occasionally they referenced the Hebrew alphabet and layout of the text [John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 4.17]. Latin Fathers such as Bede and Augustine would compare the old Latin Seputagint and Jerome’s Latin proto-Masoretic (the Masoretic as-such would not exist for several more centuries). The Septuagint version of Daniel was replaced by Theodotion’s translation from the proto-Masoretic. In all the debates between Greek East and Latin West, they seemed to never notice that they have a different Bible text.

I could write a lot more on the patristic concept of the canon of the Old Testament and the popular misconceptions floating around Orthodoxy, but let’s keep sailing.

(By “Orthodoxy” I mean the way that the Eastern tradition has coalesced over the last 500 years and especially in the 20^th century and not what the ancient saints may or may not have actually written. I am no longer convinced that capital-O “Orthodoxy” means the same thing as “patristic”.)

We understand the Septuagint and Masoretic texts by looking at both. They shine the light on each other, which I will demonstrate below. Generally we should default to using the Church of Greece Septuagint, but nothing in the Church tradition makes it unquestionable or absolute. The New Testament occasionally quotes the proto-Masoretic over the Septuagint [Matthew 2:15, John 19:37].

It is often said that the word for “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14 actually means “young woman”, and even self-identifying “conservative” evangelical protestants sometimes teach this. But this isn’t the normal word for either “virgin” or “young woman”! Everyone is wrong. The Jews are wrong. The protestant “Bible scholars” are wrong. The Orthodox seminaries are wrong. No one has actually looked at the text.

The normal word in Hebrew for “virgin” is betulah. This occurs fifty times in the Masoretic, including five times in Isaiah. The normal word for “young woman” is na’arah, which occurs 76 times, never in Isaiah. But our word in Isaiah 7:14 is almah, which occurs seven times, depending on how you count.

How do we know what words mean? We know them through context. That’s why the Greek text is usually crystal-clear, with a few exceptions. But Biblical Hebrew, like all things Jewish, gets more confusing the more you study it. The word almah does not have enough usages to give it a clear meaning, but it always refers to a young woman who is unattached. It’s never a young mother, like the Jews and protestants claim. Here are all the other instances in which the word appears, using the KJV. Almah is in bold.

Genesis 24:43 behold, I stand by the well of water; and it shall come to pass, that when the virgin cometh forth to draw water, and I say to her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water of thy pitcher to drink;

Exodus 2:8 And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child’s mother.

Psalm 68:25 The singers went before, the players on instruments followed after;

Among them were the damsels playing with timbrels.

Proverbs 30:19 The way of an eagle in the air;

The way of a serpent upon a rock;

The way of a ship in the midst of the sea;

And the way of a man with a maid.

Song of Solomon 1:3 Because of the savor of thy good ointments

Thy name is as ointment poured forth,

Therefore do the virgins love thee.

Song of Solomon 6:8 There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines,

And virgins without number.

There are also two instances where the combination of letters is used as a title or name in 1 Chronicles 15:20 and Psalm 46:1, bringing the possible total up to nine.

None of these usages have anything to do with a young mother or even a bride. The word is vague. We cannot give it clear boundaries based on context.

But we can look at how the Septuagint translators translated it.

Genesis 24:43 and Isaiah 7:14 has παρθένος, meaning “virgin”. The passage in Genesis refers to Rebekah, the future wife of Isaac.

Exodus 2:8, Psalm 68:26, and Song of Solomon 1:3 and 6:8 has νεᾶνις, meaning “young woman”.

Proverbs 30:19 has νεότης, meaning “youth”, as in Mark 10:20, And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these have I observed from my youth. The LXX has a different rendering of this verse than the MT: and the ways of a man in youth instead of And the way of a man with a maid. Sometimes the MT just has a stronger reading than the LXX. Compare the verse after.

The passage in Exodus is the important one. This refers to Miriam, the sister of Moses. Our Hebrew word almah refers to Miriam in Exodus and Mary in Isaiah. And Miriam is a prototype of Mary.

In the New Testament, there are many Mary’s. All of these in Greek are Maria, Μαρία, except for the woman in Romans 16:6 and the Mother of Jesus. Mary the Mother of Jesus is always Mariam, Μαριάμ, in the nominative, dative and accusative cases. Both forms are Μαρίας in the genitive. Only once is the Mother of Jesus called Μαρία in Acts 1:14, unless you count the references to the Myrrh-bearing women in the synoptic gospels, which is up for speculation as to which of the infinite Mary’s they refer to.

All that is to say, and to over-simplify a little, Mary the Mother of Jesus is a different Mary than all the other Mary’s. She is Mariam. The others are Maria.

Miriam in the Greek Septuagint is also Mariam and only ever Mariam. There is no Maria in the Septuagint except for a priest in 2 Chronicles 31:15, depending on which LXX source text you’re looking at.

So Miriam is a prototype of Mary, both because they are referenced with the same rare Hebrew word and because they both have the same unique name. Miriam helped raise up Moses, the law-giver who led the people out of the slavery to the pagan Egyptians. Mary gave birth to and raised Jesus, who fulfilled and clarified the law and led the people out of the slavery to death and paganism. It’s like poetry – they rhyme.

Now the prototype is always less than the referent archetype. The shadow imitates the actual object. Miriam, by all appearances, was a virgin prophetess. In all the mountains of lineages and land allocations that the Old Testament gives, there is nothing about Miriam having a husband, children or inheritance. There seems to be a connection in the Bible between virgin women and the vocation of prophecy [Acts 21:9].

So if Miriam was a committed virgin, and if Miriam is a prototype of Mary the Mother of Jesus, then that means that Mary was also a committed virgin, even after giving birth to Jesus.

There we go. Your Jewish problem solved. The Masoretic Text proves the perpetual virginity of Mary, which you can only find if you look at both the Septuagint and the Masoretic. The Orthodox only look at the Septuagint, and the Protestants only look at the Masoretic and the rabbinical commentaries, and so neither side understands the text.