12. The Septuagint and Hebrew mistranslations could hold major revelations about the Virgin Mary.
The text of the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek more than two centuries before the Common Era, meaning some Old Testament books were available in Greek before the New Testament was written. The Greek translation is known as the Septuagint. The Septuagint is generally agreed upon by scholars as containing numerous errors of translation based upon poorly understood Hebrew synonyms. The translators allowed several Hebrew words to be used interchangeably when their meanings in the original were very much different. One of these is the Hebrew word alma, which was translated into Greek as meaning virgin, when in fact it refers to a young woman, betulah being the Hebrew word to refer to a pure woman, that is, a virgin.
Isaiah 7:14 prophecies the birth of Emmanuel to a virgin, and is quoted in the first Chapter of Matthew, describing the virgin birth of Christ, one of the bases of Christianity. But Isaiah uses the Hebrew word amah, meaning a young woman, rather than betulah, meaning a pure woman. Matthew quotes the virgin birth as being the fulfillment of the prophet, the delivery of the Messiah. But the translation is wrong. The word amah appears only once in Isaiah (7:14) but the word betulah appears five times in the book, each time clearly in reference to a virgin (23:4, 23:12, 37:22, 47:1, and 62:5). The translation into Greek remains the source of the description of the prophecy of the virgin birth, it is not apparent in the original Hebrew.