During last year’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum, at a special viewing for the local Jewish community, two women stood confounded before the reproduction of the famed Isaiah scroll. Troubled by the translation of Isaiah 7:14 that said a messiah would be born of a “virgin,” they quickly sought out a docent.
That’s just one interpretation of the Hebrew word almah, the docent, a prominent Jewish educator, told them. Many scholars, he noted, translate the word as “young woman.”
Two new English revisions of the Bible – the New American Bible published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Zondervan and Biblica’s New International Version favored by most Protestants – are out this spring, each presenting the almah translation differently.