Open Isaiah 7:14 in a modern Hebrew-based Old Testament and the prophet’s word for the woman who will bear the promised child is עַלְמָה (almah). The careful reader notices something the Christmas tradition rarely mentions: this is not the Hebrew word for virgin. Almah names a young woman of marriageable age. It can carry the meaning virgin, since such a young woman in that culture would ordinarily be assumed to be one, but it does not specify it. The word points to a stage of life, not to a sexual status.

This matters because of what English readers expect to find under the verse Matthew made famous. Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of the virgin birth — the virgin will conceive. The modern reader who turns back to Isaiah in her NIV, ESV, or NRSV finds, instead, a young woman. Something has happened between Isaiah and Matthew, and the something is the Greek translation. The Septuagint, produced in Alexandria roughly two centuries before Jesus, rendered almah with the Greek parthenos — a word that does mean virgin specifically. The Hebrew left the matter open; the Greek closed it. Matthew quoted the Greek.

It’s worth being precise about what almah does and doesn’t do here, because the precision is the whole point. The Hebrew has another word — betulah — that specifically and unambiguously means virgin. Isaiah did not reach for that word. He reached for almah. So the Hebrew text of Isaiah 7:14, read on its own terms, promises a sign involving a young woman of marriageable age conceiving and bearing a son. That fits Mary. It also doesn’t rule out the ordinary way young women conceive sons. The specifically-virginal reading enters the verse through the Septuagint’s word choice, not through Isaiah’s.

None of this unsettles the doctrine; it locates it. The virgin birth is attested elsewhere in the Gospels in plain narrative, not resting on Isaiah alone. What recovering almah offers the modern reader is honesty about the texture of the prophecy Matthew cites: the Hebrew word is open where the Greek is specific. Hearing that gap is hearing what the first audience of the Hebrew prophet heard — a young woman, a sign, a son named God with us — before the Greek translation pressed it into a sharper and more famous shape.