Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 1:23

"Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, And they shall call his name Immanuel; which is, being interpreted, God with us." — Matthew 1:23 (ASV)

Behold, a virgin shall be with child—It is not as easy for us as it seemed to St. Matthew to trace the meaning in Isaiah's words that he assigns to them. In a literal translation from the Hebrew, the words of Isaiah 7:14 are as follows: Behold, the maiden conceives and bears a son, and calls his name Immanuel.

If we read these words in connection with the events recorded in that chapter—the alliance of the kings of Syria and Israel against Judah, Isaiah’s promise of deliverance, his offer of a sign to confirm his promise, and Ahaz's hypocritical refusal of that offer because he preferred to rely on his plan for an alliance with Assyria—their natural meaning seems to be this: The prophet either points to a young woman of marriageable age or speaks as if he sees one in his vision of the future. He says that the sign will be that she will conceive and bear a son (the fulfillment of this prediction is the sign, without assuming a supernatural conception), and that she would give that son a name embodying the true hope of Israel: "God is with us."

The early years of that child would be nourished not on the ordinary food of a civilized and settled population, but on clotted milk and wild honey. This diet, as we see in the case of John the Baptist, was the food of those who lived in the wilderness and appears in Isaiah 7:15 and 22 as part of the picture of the desolation to which the country would be reduced by the Assyrian invasion. But despite that misery, even before the child reached the age when he could refuse evil and choose good, the land of the kings whom Ahaz and his people were then dreading would be "forsaken of both her kings." Understood this way, the passage is natural and coherent.

It must be added, however, that Isaiah associated this child with extraordinary hopes. The land of Israel was to be his land (Isaiah 8:8). It is hardly possible not to connect his name with the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father of Isaiah 9:6, or with the Rod and Branch from the stem of Jesse who was to grow up and present the picture of an ideal king (Isaiah 11:1–9). All that we speak of as the prophet's Messianic hopes clustered around the child Immanuel. As we know, those hopes were not fulfilled as he had expected; they remained for a later generation to feed on with yearning desire. Yet, as far as we know, they did not suggest to any Jewish interpreter the idea of a completely supernatural birth. That thought was not part of the popular expectations of the Messiah. Indeed, it was foreign to the prevailing Jewish feeling about the holiness of marriage and all it involved, and would have appealed only to a small section of the more austere Essenes.

However, St. Matthew, recording the facts of our Lord’s birth and reading Isaiah with a mind full of the new truths of the Incarnation, could not fail to be struck by the correspondence between the events and the words he quotes. These words, in the Greek translation, were even more emphatic than in the Hebrew. He saw in them a prophecy that had at last been fulfilled. He does not say whether he viewed it as a conscious or unconscious prophecy; he was simply sure that the coincidence was not accidental.

This view, it is believed, deals fairly with both parts of the problem. While it modifies to some extent what was, until recently, the common view of Isaiah’s prediction, it also anticipates the objection that the narrative was a myth that grew out of a popular understanding of the prophecy. It would be more accurate to say that the narrated events themselves first gave rise to this interpretation of the prophecy. St. Luke, who narrates the events with much greater fullness than St. Matthew, does so without any reference to the prophet’s words.

Emmanuel—As spoken by Isaiah, the name did not necessarily mean more than that "God was with His people," protecting, guiding, and ruling them. It is similar to the name "The LORD our Righteousness," which Jeremiah applied not only to the future Christ (Jeremiah 23:6) but also to Jerusalem (Jeremiah 33:16). The Church of Christ, however, has rightly followed the Evangelist in seeing in it a witness to a Presence more direct, personal, and immediate than any known before. It was more than a watchword and a hope—more than a name with a prophetic meaning—and had become a divine reality.