Isaiah7chapter 7

The crisis is documented on both sides. Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Israel had formed a bloc against Assyria and wanted Judah in it. Ahaz refused, so they marched to depose him and put a man they called the son of Tabeel on David's throne. Isaiah's contempt is in the phrasing — he will not even give Pekah his royal title, calling him only the son of Remaliah.

The meeting place is a practical one. Ahaz is out inspecting the water. Jerusalem's spring lay outside the wall in the valley, and an open channel carried its water along the slope to a pool; in a siege, water was the whole question. The launderers' field beside it was where cloth was washed and bleached — work that needed running water, open ground to spread the cloth, and enough distance from the houses that nobody had to smell the stale urine and alkali used to scour the wool.

Isaiah brings his son, whose name means a remnant shall return — a walking two-edged message, since it promises both that some come back and that only some do. Ahaz, meanwhile, was already drafting his own answer: he emptied the temple and palace treasuries and bought Assyrian protection. Tiglath-pileser III's own annals list a king of Judah among his tribute-payers, and by 732 BC Damascus was destroyed and Rezin dead — exactly as Isaiah said, and exactly at the price Isaiah warned about.

The sign given to a refusing king turns on one Hebrew word, almah. It means a young woman of marriageable age, and every use in the Old Testament fits an unmarried one; critics argue it says no more than that, since Hebrew has a narrower word for virgin. The answer the traditional view gives is that Jewish translators themselves, making the Greek version two centuries before Christ, chose the word for virgin — and Matthew read it that way. Many hold that the sign had a near fulfillment in a child born in Ahaz's own day whose growing-up marked the clock, and its full weight in the birth Matthew names.

The last picture is a wrecked economy. Curds and honey sound rich; they are not. They are what you eat when the fields are gone, the cattle roam untended, and a man keeps one cow and two sheep on the ruins of a vineyard that once had a thousand vines.