What about this interpretation:
Isaiah is giving a Messianic prediction; he's not talking about a birth that's only a few months away.

So, if there is any "ambiguity" in the term (and I could be content with the word "maiden" since it might be the most exact equivalent, even to its semantic range), its resolution is definitively cleared up in the virgin birth.


Answering the last issue: the use of parthenos in Gen 34, the verses in focus are a tight construction, and employ the vav-consecutive (a standard form for sequential narrative), however there is really no objection to the LXX translators interpreting v3 might have seen that specific activity as temporally prior to the actual rape. IOW, their reasoning might have been, what is more likely: that he flirted with her or sweet talked before or after he violated her?

It is not as though such storytelling devices as later insertion of facts-of-past-relevance are unknown to the Bible. E.g. Gen 37:2ff. Joseph's story begins, his age of 17 is given. And then follows significant background to the "coat-of-many-colors" incident, which doesn't fully resume until v12. It is all necessary to understanding their hostility that comes out in the attack on Joseph.

Meaning, that the LXX did not intend to speak of her in v3 as having been raped already, but before that, i.e. retrospect, what got her into his chambers without resistance, so to speak.

Bottom line, the Greek word indicates a virgin, period. And its use proves that at least a couple centuries before Christ's birth, the Isaiah 7 passage passage was seen as saying far more than modern interpreters wish to restrict it to say.

__________________
Rev. Bruce G. Buchanan
ChainOLakes Presbyterian Church, CentralLake, MI


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