Immanuel and the Child — Isaiah 7–9

Two armies march on Jerusalem and the king’s heart shakes like the trees in the wind. God’s answer is not a treaty or a wall. It is a child, then another child, then a Child whose names are the names of God.

Two Smoking Firebrands and a Shaken King

Around 734 BC Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel marched on Jerusalem to force Judah into their league against Assyria (Isaiah 7:1–6). King Ahaz’s heart “was moved … as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.” This was a king who had “made his son to pass through the fire” (2 Kings 16:3). Now the Lord sends Isaiah to meet him at the conduit of the upper pool: go, “thou, and Shear-jashub thy son” (7:3).

Why do you think God told him to take his son? Because the boy’s name was the sermon.

Shear-jashub means “a remnant shall return.” A king who had burned his son meets a prophet holding his son by the hand, and the name says judgment is coming but will not be the end. Would Judah follow the north into captivity? A remnant shall return.

Most readers never find the rest of that sentence. It comes in chapter 10: “The remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the mighty God” (Isaiah 10:21). The Hebrew is she’ar yashuv … el gibbor, and el gibbor is the third name of the Child in 9:6. Return to whom? To the Child. The boy at the conduit and the Child on the throne belong to ONE sentence, spread over four chapters.

“If Ye Will Not Believe” — The Amen Wordplay

“Fear not.” The two kings are “two tails of these smoking firebrands” — burnt stubs, more smoke than fire — and their plan “shall not stand” (7:4–7). Then the condition, a play on one Hebrew root:

Isaiah 7:9 — one root, two stems

If ye will not believe — ta’aminu,

surely ye shall not be established — te’amenu.

Both verbs come from ’mn, the root of “amen.” The ESV catches it: “If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.”

Why was the king at the conduit? The text does not say; checking his water before a siege is the likeliest reading. Ahaz was relying on his pipes. So Isaiah returns to water in 8:6–7: the people refuse “the waters of Shiloah that go softly,” and get “the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria.” Refuse the soft water and you get the flood.

Then God offers Ahaz a sign, “in the depth, or in the height above.” Ahaz declines: “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord” (7:11–12). It sounds like scripture, and it is (Deuteronomy 6:16).

So why is Isaiah angry? Because to tempt God is to demand a sign He has not offered, and here God was offering. Ahaz used a verse to shut a door God had opened. He had already written to Tiglath-pileser, “I am thy servant and thy son: come up, and save me,” paying him from the temple treasury (2 Kings 16:7–8). False piety is often that — a religious reason not to hear.

A Virgin, an Almah, and the Sign Given Anyway

Isaiah 7:14

“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”

The Hebrew is ha-almah, “the maiden,” a young woman of marriageable age. Critics are right that almah is not the technical word for virgin; that is betulah. They are wrong that it rules virginity out. The first almah in the Bible is Rebekah, rendered “virgin” in the King James (Genesis 24:43) because the narrator has already said she was “a virgin, neither had any man known her” (24:16).

Nor is the virgin reading a Christian invention. The Septuagint, the Jewish Greek translation the Bible Dictionary says was finished by the mid-second century before Christ, rendered almah here as parthenos, virgin — as it did for Rebekah. Matthew quoted the Bible his readers already had.

The Book of Mormon adds witnesses who never argued over a noun. Nephi carried the verse (2 Nephi 17:14) and then saw it: “in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin … the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh” (1 Nephi 11:13–21). Alma names her “a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel” (Alma 7:10).

Two Children, One Sign

Is Isaiah 7:14 about Ahaz’s day or about Christ? Verse 16 ties it to Ahaz: before the child can “choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.” Within a few years Assyria “slew Rezin” (2 Kings 16:9), and Pekah was murdered by his own man (2 Kings 15:30). A sign that meant nothing to Ahaz would not have been a sign to Ahaz.

Chapter 8 builds a second child on the same frame. The prophetess bears Maher-shalal-hash-baz, “swift is the booty, speedy is the prey,” and “before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father,” Damascus and Samaria are spoiled (8:3–4). Compare Isaiah 7:14–17 with 8:3–7 and Matthew 1:21–23:

The sign in three places

Look at that last row. “The breadth of thy land, O Immanuel” (8:8) and “for God is with us” (8:10) end in the SAME Hebrew words, immanu el. The land belongs to Immanuel, and no child of Isaiah’s house could own it.

Only one Child could make the name literally true: “they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matthew 1:22–23). That is dualism. It is very cool how Isaiah writes about the past, and present, and future all at the same time.

A Stone of Stumbling, and “To the Law and to the Testimony”

“Neither fear ye their fear.” Whom then? “Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself … And he shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence” (8:12–14). One Lord, refuge to one man and stumbling stone to another. What decides it? Whether he trusts Him. Peter reads that stone as Christ (1 Peter 2:8), so the “Lord of hosts himself” is Jesus by the New Testament’s own reading.

Then the counterfeit. Why seek “wizards that peep, and that mutter”? “Should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?” (8:19). Nephi’s copy clears the last clause: “for the living to hear from the dead?” (2 Nephi 18:19). Why would the living go to the dead when they can go to God?

Isaiah gives the test: “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (8:20). Our age has its own peepers and mutterers — the medium, the channelled message, the influencer who contradicts the prophets with a warm feeling. Isaiah’s own course was harder: “I will wait upon the Lord.” Waiting is harder than peeping. It is also the one that works.

“Unto Us a Child Is Born” — The Four Names

Chapter 8 ends “driven to darkness.” The next line turns it: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” (9:1–2). Where? Zebulun and Naphtali, “Galilee of the nations.” Later Jesus “dwelt in Capernaum … in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim” that it might be fulfilled (Matthew 4:13–16). The light began where the darkness began.

“A child is born … a son is given” are Hebrew perfects, yullad and nittan: has been born, seven hundred years early. And the names fall in four pairs:

Isaiah 9:6 — four paired names

1  Pele yo’etz — Wonderful, Counsellor

2  El gibbor — The mighty God

3  Avi-ad — The everlasting Father

4  Sar shalom — The Prince of Peace

Our layout. The outer names suit a good king; the inner two no earthly king could claim. And verse 7: “there shall be no end.”

But “everlasting Father” for the Son? In 1916 the First Presidency and the Twelve explained that Jehovah is called Father as the Creator, and “with analogous meaning Jesus Christ is called ‘The Everlasting Father’ (Isa. 9:6; compare 2 Ne. 19:6)” (“The Father and the Son”). He is Father, too, of those born again through Him: “this day he hath spiritually begotten you” (Mosiah 5:7). He says it Himself — “I am the Father and the Son” (Ether 3:14). He held the title of GOD before He was born, and brought it with Him to Bethlehem.

“His Hand Is Stretched Out Still” — The Four Stanzas

Right after the most hopeful verses in Isaiah comes a judgment poem with a chorus. The chapter break after 9:21 cuts it in two, so most readers never see it whole:

Isaiah 9:8–10:4 — the refrain poem

I  Pride: “we will build with hewn stones” (9:10–12)

II  Leaders “cause them to err” (9:13–17)

III  “Wickedness burneth as the fire” (9:18–21)

IV  “Unrighteous decrees” (10:1–4)

each ends: “For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still”

The repeated words show it. The sins move inward, from national pride to injustice written into law.

The key line is 9:13: “the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them.” The blows were meant to produce a turn. Pride did not turn them, losing their leaders did not, civil war did not. So the hand stays out.

Striking or reaching? Here it strikes. But the same Lord, speaking to latter-day Gentiles, states the condition aloud: “I will be merciful unto them, saith the Lord God, if they will repent and come unto me; for mine arm is lengthened out all the day long” (2 Nephi 28:32). IF they will repent. One arm. What it does depends on whether we turn.

Key References

A Child in the Middle of a War

Ahaz did what frightened people do: he trusted the biggest power he could see, and Assyria came up “even to the neck” (8:8). How do we rely on the flesh instead of God? Usually the same way — quietly, sensibly, with a good verse for why we will not ask.

God’s answer to fear was not a strategy. It was a Person: a boy named for a promise, a boy named for a warning, and at last a Child named Immanuel, God with us.

When your heart is moved “as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind,” He is the sign still offered. Ask.

← Woe Is Me — Isaiah’s Call, Isaiah 6  ·  The Words of Isaiah — Study Guide  ·  The Root of Jesse — Isaiah 11–12 →