This passage comes from the wider catalog — a broader, more lightly curated list than the core set. Both readings are shown as peers; GEBible takes no side.
13He said, “Listen now, house of David. Is it not enough for you to try the patience of men, that you will try the patience of my God also?14Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.15He shall eat butter and honey when he knows to refuse the evil and choose the good.16For before the child knows to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you abhor shall be forsaken.17Yahweh will bring on you, on your people, and on your father’s house, days that have not come, from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah, even the king of Assyria.
The counter-reading
How this passage is read within its own context.
The critical reading situates Isaiah 7:14 in the Syro-Ephraimite crisis of roughly 735 BCE, where the sign reassures King Ahaz that the Syro-Israelite threat will pass within a child's early years. On this view the Hebrew 'almah denotes a young woman of marriageable age rather than a certified virgin, for which the term betulah was available, and the child is most plausibly a near-contemporary figure. The emphasis on virginity is traced to the Septuagint's choice of parthenos, on which the later birth-narrative citation depends. This approach treats the messianic application as a Christian rereading of a text originally addressing an 8th-century BCE political situation.
The fulfillment reading
How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.
The messianic-fulfillment reading takes Isaiah 7:14 as a sign-prophecy whose fullest realization is the virginal conception announced in Luke 1:35 and cited in the Matthean birth narrative. On this view the Septuagint's rendering of 'almah as parthenos reflects a pre-Christian Jewish understanding that the promised child would be born extraordinarily, and the emphatic 'sign' language is taken to imply something beyond an ordinary birth. Proponents often work within a dual-fulfillment (sensus plenior) framework: an initial referent in Isaiah's own generation together with an ultimate fulfillment in Jesus. The virgin conception is thus presented as the sign's deeper intended meaning rather than a departure from the text.
How the New Testament uses this passage
Each entry names how the New Testament author draws on the passage — a direct quotation, an allusion, an echo, or a typological reading. An echo or an allusion is not the same as a prediction; the label says which is which.
The listed fulfillmentRef, Luke 1:35, contains no verbal citation of Isaiah 7:14; it shares only the thematic motif of a miraculous/virginal conception (the formula quotation of Isa 7:14 is actually Matthew 1:22-23).
