“As I recall, the Hebrew word in the original does not necessarily imply virginity.”
Actually, that’s exactly what it does “imply”.
The Greek Septuagint (made before Christ) translates the word as “parthenos” (as in “parthenon”), which means simply “virgin”.
As the article notes, one problem in that unlike English, there are not a plethora of translations for Germans to compare with one another.
When they get the “official” translation, for most of them, that’s it.
I don’t understand your comment. The passage is from Isaiah, which was written in Hebrew. Many centuries later, it was translated into Greek. The Septuagint is not authoritative.
Eggs Ackley! And if one is familiar with the Historical perspective on Judaism, a young girl was assumed to be a virgin, without having to specify! The term ‘maiden’ was applied and meant ‘virginal female’ ... when the King James translator did their work they knew the historical perspective and applied it.
Elizabeth I was referred to as “the Virgin Queen”, even though she was no virgin as we use the word. The meaning was that she was unmarried and had no children.
The meanings of words change over time — check out “terrific” (one of Trump’s favorite words) and “awful”, for example.
(This is one reason that “original intent” is so important — we apply teh meaning of the word when it was written, and not the contemporary meanignof a word like “militia”.)