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Verse 3

Then Isaiah had sexual relations with his wife. Since the expression "approached" is a euphemism used several times in the Old Testament for the first intercourse between a man and his wife, it is possible that Isaiah’s first wife, the mother of Shearjashub (Isaiah 7:3), died and the prophet remarried. [Note: See Herbert M. Wolf, "A Solution to the Immanuel Prophecy in Isaiah 7:14-8:22," Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972):454; and Wiersbe, p. 19.] In this case, the ’alma of Isaiah 7:14 could refer to Isaiah’s second wife, and Immanuel could have been Maher-shalal-hash-baz. However, "approached" (Heb. qrb) often describes sexual relations in general (Genesis 20:4; Leviticus 18:6; Leviticus 18:14; Leviticus 18:19; Leviticus 20:16; Deuteronomy 22:14; Ezekiel 18:6). So this could have been Isaiah’s first wife. By naming her son Immanuel, she made a prophetic statement: God would be with His people in the coming crisis. When she bore a son, Yahweh told Isaiah to name him Maher-shalal-hash-baz. The child’s mother evidently gave him one name and his father gave him the other.

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