UTN uW Translation Notes:

Isaiah 7 General Notes

Structure and formatting

Some translations set each line of poetry farther to the right than the rest of the text to make it easier to read. The ULT does this with the poetry in 7:7–9, 18–25.

Special concepts in this chapter

“Young woman” or "virgin" in 7:14

In verse 14, Isaiah uses a specific term that describes a woman who has reached the age at which she is able to have children but who has not yet had a child. This term could apply to a woman who was married or to a woman who was not yet married. Some translators of the Bible have translated this term as “virgin” because they have considered it to be a prophesy of how the Messiah would be born of a woman who had never had sexual relations with a man. Jesus was born in this way (Matthew 1:18, Luke 1:34). Other translators have considered that the initial reference of this prophecy was to the wife of Ahaz, the queen of Judah, who had not yet given birth to a royal heir, and so they translate the term as "young woman," since she was married. (The fact that there was no heir to the throne may have provided an occasion for the enemies of Judah to try to make someone else king, as verse 6 describes.) Understood this way, the prophecy would be a promise that Ahaz's queen would indeed give birth to a royal heir (this child became the godly king Hezekiah) and the dynasty of David would continue, particularly since God would also defeat those enemies. It is possible that this prophecy had an initial fulfillment in Hezekiah and a later fulfillment in Jesus. Some languages may be able to accommodate both possibilities by using a term such as the English word "maiden," which has the same general range of reference as the term that Isaiah uses. This is what the ULT does. If your language does not have such a term, if a translation of the Bible already exists in your region, you may wish to use a term similar to the one that it uses; if a translation of the Bible does not exist in your region, decide which interpretive possibility you would like to express in your translation.

Other possible translation difficulties in this chapter

Israel

In this chapter, the name Israel describes the northern of the two kingdoms into which the former larger kingdom of Israel, which David and Solomon had ruled, had become divided. This chapter also refers to this northern kingdom as Ephraim, using the name of its most prominent tribe.