Isaiah 7:14
Isaiah 7:1414Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call Him Immanuel.
The Watchtower's reading of has shifted with the translation. The 1984 NWT rendered the Hebrew almah as "the maiden," the 2013 revision shifted to "the young woman" — both deliberately avoiding "virgin." On the JW reading, Isaiah's prophecy has a near-term fulfilment in Isaiah's own time and only a typological echo in the Messiah; "Immanuel" ("God with us") is read as a symbolic name for divine presence, not a claim that the child is himself God.
settles the question by inspiration: "the virgin will become pregnant and will give birth to a son, and they will name him Immanuel, which means, when translated, 'With us is God.'" Matthew uses the unambiguous Greek parthenos ("virgin") to render Isaiah's almah, and applies the prophecy to Mary's virginal conception of Jesus. The naming clause "with us is God" is not symbolic decoration — Matthew presents the conception itself as fulfilment of the deity-incarnation prophecy. Pair with ("the Word became flesh and resided among us"), ("though he was existing in God's form... emptied himself"), and ("in him all the fullness of the divine quality dwells bodily"). The child of is the one whose conception was virginal because his being is divine.
When it is argued that the sign was fulfilled by a child in Ahaz's day (7:16, "before the boy knows how to reject the bad and choose the good"), follow Isaiah's own thread. The sign is given to "the house of David" (7:13), and Immanuel reappears as the owner of the land: "His outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel!" (8:8). The thread then reaches the child of 9:6, who sits "on the throne of David" (9:7) and is called "Mighty God," the title Isaiah gives Jehovah in 10:21. Whatever near-term sign Ahaz received, Isaiah himself ties Immanuel to the divine King of chapter 9, which is why Matthew can say the prophecy was fulfilled in Jesus.
The NWT renders almah as "maiden" (1984) and "young woman" (2013) — both readings are lexically possible for almah but neither matches the inspired apostolic translation. quotes using parthenos, the unambiguous Greek for "virgin" — the same word the Septuagint used over a century before Matthew. Standard English translations preserve "virgin" because the New Testament's apostolic translation is decisive for Christian translation choice. The NWT's "young woman" weakens the link between Isaiah's prophecy and the New Testament's virgin-birth narrative — useful to a Christology that needs the incarnation to be a creature taking human form rather than the eternal Son taking true human nature.