Hey, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour, and we're working our way through the book of Matthew right now, one little tiny chunk at a time in 10-minute increments every weekday. And where do the part now? It gets a little bit awkward because it's about how a baby was conceived. And the questions about babies being conceived can be weird, especially when there's a cultural issue with virginity that had so much more to do with just virginal, biblical, ethical, ancient Near Eastern notions of purity, but it had to do with contractual obligations, it had to do with family standing in society, it had to do with relationships between families and in the community, and it has to do with the genealogical lineage of people who are connected to ancient promises that they believe are still going to come true. So there is so much at stake when it comes to the question of how Jesus was conceived just from the perspective of Mary and Joseph and their immediate family. Then we step back even further from that and we consider how much is at stake in the grand theological narrative of God's redemptive plan and whether Jesus really does tick all the boxes or not. And we realize, wow, there's even bigger questions in play right here. That is before we even get into the set of questions that come with the virgin birth about, well, how did that happen? And skeptics looking in from the outside and saying, that doesn't seem very likely. And frankly, they have a point. It is very, very unlikely that there would be any kind of virgin birth ever. But here we have all this other stuff around it that causes me to think, well, sort of looks like there was a virgin birth here. So we got a long ways to go on these questions about the conception and birth of Jesus, Mary's role in that, Joseph's role in that. But we left off yesterday with a question I was about to ask about some of the language surrounding the word virgin. There's a language issue here that makes things a little bit tricky as well. Isaiah 7.14, a very famous verse predicting the arrival of the Messiah, says, Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel. Well, virgin there in the original Hebrew is Alma. And Alma isn't really a word that was used for a sexual virgin. It was more of a maiden, a young woman of marrying age or approaching marrying age. Whereas in Greek, the word for virgin is a little bit different. Why does this matter? Why wouldn't people just read it in Hebrew and get it straight? Well, there's history that happens in between the Old Testament and New Testament. Remember? Alexander the Great comes along and conquers everything and Greekifies the whole world, including the Jewish people, and a whole bunch of Jewish people end up in Alexandria in northern Egypt, and they don't really speak Hebrew anymore. So if they want to have the Bible, they're going to need that in Greek. And so there's this lengthy translation process of what we call the Old Testament that creates something called the Septuagint. You'll see that represented with LXX, like 70, like the legend of 70 scribes working together to translate perfectly what God had recorded in Hebrew into the new language of the day, which was Greek. This is a couple hundred years before Jesus. And the way they translated the Hebrew word for virgin, Alma, into Greek at that time is a little bit tricky because the Greek word they use is Parthenat. No, Parthenas. I always want to get that wrong. Parthanax is the dragon that you have to kill in Skyrim. Parthenas is the Greek word for virgin, which means sexual virgin in Greek. So when Matthew and the other New Testament authors are reading the scriptures, they're reading the Septuagint, not so much the Hebrew Old Testament scriptures. It covers the same stuff, but they're reading it in Greek. And so virgin could be ambiguous when we get to Matthew. And so some people have tried to argue over time that Matthew maybe doesn't mean like a literal actual virgin. What he really means is like a young woman of marrying age who maybe had had sex or something. But that doesn't hold up when we look at the rest of the passage. I mean, if we want to play the I know Greek or I know Hebrew game, you can make the Bible say anything, but this looks pretty specific. His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. And he uses the word virgin specifically, in quoting that verse I just read from Isaiah 7, when he says in verse 23 of Matthew chapter 1, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. So we're using the word virgin in the context of something that clearly indicates that no sexual contact had occurred. But again, lest there be any confusion about the language, the text makes it clear three different ways that no, we really mean like virgin virgin, like sexual virgin. So she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Then a couple of verses later, uh, you're to take Mary home to be your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. Then we get toward the end of the thing, and it says, But he, meaning Joseph, had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. So they're laying it on pretty thick here in Matthew, and this is reiterated in the corresponding account in Luke chapter 1 and verse 34, where we've got Mary saying, How will this be since I'm a virgin? So look, there's a lot more to think about here in terms of how this actually went down. But what cannot be argued is that the text is making it crystal clear that we are talking about a conception and a birth apart from the physical act of sexual intercourse, that Jesus was miraculously conceived in Mary by the work of God. Tomorrow we're gonna pick it up by rounding out the question of how did this happen, and then tearing into the bigger question of why does it matter one way or the other? I think that's going to be a very fascinating conversation, and it's gonna set us up to get into asking the question of where Joseph fits in all of that. That's one of the unique things about the Matthew birth account, much shorter than the Luke birth account, is that we really do get a little more of a sense of who this Joseph guy is and what's going on in his brain. And I'm excited to talk about that as well. Okay, we're gonna hit timeout there. Thank you so much to everyone who supports this program at patreon.com slash the TMBH podcast. Seriously, it makes a gigantic difference for my time and my family, my ability to just get this work done. And also it makes it possible for me to think in terms of what we want to do together in processing this instead of what might please some current or future algorithm. And it's really nice to have that freedom in terms of how we approach this. So I'm going on and on. Thank you again. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll catch you tomorrow.