The Coal and the Sign

If someone asks you

Isaias 7:14 does not say “virgin.”

The Hebrew word is 'almah, which means a young woman of marriageable age. The precise Hebrew word for virgin is bethulah, and Isaias did not use it. The RSV, NRSV, and most critical translations render it "young woman." Matthew was reading a Greek translation, not the Hebrew, and he built the most famous claim in Christianity on the Septuagint's loose choice of parthenos. Worse, the context destroys the Christian reading: the sign is given to Ahaz in 735 B.C. to reassure him about this war, and 7:16 sets the clock — before the child knows good from evil, the two kings will be gone. A birth seven hundred years later is not a sign to Ahaz. It is not even a sign.

Take it in order.

(1) The lexical claim overstates. 'Almah is nowhere clearly used of a married woman in the Hebrew Bible, and in Genesis 24 Rebecca is called bethulah and 'almah in the same episode — the words overlap.

(2) Bethulah is not the airtight term the objection needs it to be: Joel 1:8 has a bethulah mourning "the husband of her youth." The precision argument cuts both ways.

(3) The Septuagint's parthenos was chosen by Jewish translators two centuries before Christ, with no possible Christian agenda; Irenaeus already presses this against Theodotion and Aquila in the second century.

(4) The addressee shifts in the text itself. Verse 11 speaks to Achaz singular; verse 13 turns to "the house of David," and the "you" of verse 14 is plural. Isaias stops talking to a king and starts talking to a dynasty.

(5) On the timeline, be honest rather than clever: Catholic exegetes have never agreed on the near-term referent, and the Church has never required one. Haydock prints Calmet's solution (a son of Isaias) and immediately prints the patristic consensus that all of it belongs to Christ. What is binding is the virginal conception of Our Lord, defined and confessed, not a particular reconstruction of the eighth century B.C. And 7:16 does not require the Emmanuel child to be born in 735. "Before the child know to refuse the evil, and to choose the good" is a measure of time, the way we say "before a boy is old enough to know better" — a span of a few years, not a biography. The two kings fell inside it: Rasin died c. 732 and Phacee was assassinated the same year (4 Kings 15:29–30; 16:9).

(6) Jerome's question still stands unanswered by the objection: young women conceive every day. A sign offered "unto the depth of hell, or unto the height above" is not a maternity announcement.

(7) He will answer that the Septuagint uses parthenos loosely too — of Dinah in Genesis 34:3, after she was violated. True, and it does not help him. A word with a soft edge in one narrative passage is still the word those translators reached for here, when they could have written neanis, "young woman" — which is precisely what Aquila and Theodotion later substituted, and why Irenaeus went after them. The question is not whether parthenos can ever stretch. It is why Jews with no stake in our argument did not stretch it here.

Say it out loud: "Jews translated that word into Greek two hundred years before Christ was born, and they wrote virgin. They had no reason on earth to do us a favor."

The God of Isaias 6 deliberately blinds people so they cannot be saved.

Read 6:10 without flinching. It is an imperative: blind the heart of this people, make their ears heavy, shut their eyes — and the stated reason is "lest they see... and be converted, and I heal them." God does not merely permit their ruin; He commissions a prophet to cause it, expressly to prevent their healing. And Jesus quotes this approvingly to explain why He teaches in parables. Mark 4:12 keeps the purpose clause intact: "that seeing they may see and not perceive... lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them." This is not a warden's slip of the tongue. It is the stated policy, endorsed by the Son.

Three things, and none of them is a dodge.

First, grammar: Hebrew and Semitic Greek habitually express a certainly foreseen result in the language of purpose or command. The prophet is commanded to do what his preaching will unavoidably accomplish in men already set against it — the same idiom that appoints Jeremias "to root up, and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy" when all he does is talk (Jeremias 1:10).

Second, the inspired gloss: Saint Matthew, quoting this very oracle, moves it out of the imperative and supplies the cause — the heart of this people is grown gross, their ears are dull of hearing, and "their eyes they have shut" (Matthew 13:15). Matthew reads the hardening as theirs. That is not a Catholic evasion; that is the New Testament's own reading of the Old.

Third, the theology: God is never the cause of sin. Grace moves the will without doing violence to it — a man can assent to it or refuse it (ST I-II, q. 111, a. 2; Trent, Session VI, ch. 5). What God does in judgment is withdraw a grace already spurned, and Saint Thomas argues that even that withdrawal is, in the elect, ordered toward eventual healing (ST I-II, q. 79, aa. 3–4).

Then read to the end of the chapter. The oracle of hardening closes with a stump and a "holy seed" (6:13). God is not building a prison. He is preserving a remnant through a fire the people insisted on lighting.

Say it out loud: "God did not blind them. He withdrew a light they had already refused — and even then He left a stump."

Isaias 6 refutes the Catholic sacramental system.

This is the cleanest picture of grace in the Old Testament, and it is not Catholic. A man stands convicted — "Woe is me, I am unclean." He performs no work. He undertakes no penance. He confesses to no priest. He does not go through a cult, a ritual, or an institution. Heaven acts unilaterally: an angel comes down, and the verbs are all passive — "thy iniquities shall be taken away, and thy sin shall be cleansed." Grace alone, by God's initiative alone, apart from any human mediation. Rome has spent fifteen hundred years inserting clergy into a transaction that Isaias 6 shows happening directly, and then insisting the insertion is necessary for salvation.

The objection has the right instinct about grace and the wrong reading of the scene.

On grace: yes, and the Church says so more strongly than the objection does. The initiative is entirely God's; Isaias contributes nothing but his need. That is Catholic doctrine, defined against the Semi-Pelagians at the Second Council of Orange (529, canons 5–7), reaffirmed at Trent (Session VI, ch. 5 and canon 3), and stated plainly in the Catechism: grace is prevenient, unmerited, and first (CCC 1996–2001, 2010). Whatever this argument refutes, it is not the Catholic Church.

On mediation: look at what God actually does. He could have forgiven by fiat. Instead He dispatches a creature, who takes up an instrument, to carry physical matter, from a specific place, and apply it to a specific part of the man's body, accompanied by a word that declares what the action effects. Sensible sign, appointed minister, divine word, real effect.

The minister here is an angel, not a priest — holy orders comes later and comes from Christ. The point is not that Isaias 6 ordains anyone. It is that God, left entirely free to forgive by bare decree, chose not to. And Isaias 6 is not itself a sacrament — the seven were instituted by Christ, and this is centuries earlier. But it is written in the same grammar, and that grammar is God's, not Rome's.

This is not a text embarrassed by mediation; it is a text built out of mediation. The Roman Rite has read it that way for well over a thousand years, which is why the priest bows before the Gospel and asks God to cleanse his lips as He cleansed the lips of Isaias with a burning coal. And note the sequence, because it is the ordination pattern and it never varies: the man is cleansed before he is sent. Nobody in Scripture commissions himself.

Say it out loud: "God had an altar, a coal, a pair of tongs, and an angel to carry it. He has never been embarrassed to work through matter — and He isn't now."