Emmanuel Means God With Us — and Jesus Was Never Called It

Emmanuel means God with us. It is two Hebrew words run together — immanu, with us, and El, God — and the striking thing about it is that Jesus was never called it. Matthew says they shall call his name Emmanuel, and then four verses later Joseph names the child Jesus.

That is not a contradiction. It is the point, and it is worth slowing down for.

A sign given to a frightened king

The word first arrives in Isaiah, in a political emergency. Two armies are marching on Jerusalem, and King Ahaz is so afraid that the prophet finds him out at the end of the aqueduct, inspecting the water supply — the act of a man counting how long a siege can be survived.

Isaiah tells him to ask God for a sign. Ahaz refuses, with a piety that is really evasion: he will not put the Lord to the test. So the sign is given anyway. A young woman will conceive and bear a son and will call his name Immanuel, and before the boy is old enough to know right from wrong the two kings Ahaz fears will be gone.

It is not, in its first setting, a soft promise. God with us is what the prophet says to a man who has decided that God is not going to be much help.

Immanuel, Emmanuel, and the letter that changed

The two spellings are the same word in two languages. Isaiah wrote Hebrew, so English Old Testaments give Immanuel. Matthew wrote Greek and used the Septuagint’s spelling, which came into Latin and then to us as Emmanuel.

That Greek translation carries one other difference, and honesty requires naming it. Isaiah’s Hebrew word is almah, a young woman of marriageable age. The Jewish scholars who rendered Isaiah into Greek, two centuries before Christ, chose parthenos — virgin. Matthew quotes their Greek.

Whole libraries have been written about that single word. What is not in dispute is that the translators made the choice long before there was any Christian argument to serve by it.

The name nobody used

Matthew gathers up Isaiah’s sign and lays it over the birth at Bethlehem: all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.

And then Joseph wakes up, does as the angel commanded, and calls him Jesus — Yeshua, the Lord saves. Nobody in the Gospels addresses him as Emmanuel. Not his mother, not his disciples, not his enemies.

Because it was never a name for daily use. It is a description of what had happened. Jesus is the name he answered to in a Galilean village; Emmanuel is what he was while answering to it.

Why the word is at Christmas

The hymn everyone knows — O come, O come, Emmanuel — is a translation of a medieval Latin verse built from the O Antiphons, the short cries sung at vespers in the last seven days before Christmas. Each one calls Christ by a different title out of the prophets. Emmanuel is the last of them, sung on the twenty-third of December, the night before the waiting ends.

That is why the hymn sounds like longing rather than celebration. It was written to be sung while it was still dark.

Frequently asked

Is it spelled Emmanuel or Immanuel?

Both are correct, depending on which Testament. Immanuel is the Hebrew form and appears in Isaiah; Emmanuel is the Greek and Latin form and appears in Matthew. As a given name today, either spelling is used, along with Manuel and Manuela in Spanish and Portuguese.

Where does the word appear in the Bible?

Three times in Isaiah — at the sign to Ahaz, and twice more in the following chapter, where the phrase immanu El is turned against an invading army — and once in Matthew, quoting the first of those.

If it means God with us, why is he called Jesus?

The two names do different jobs. Jesus, from the Hebrew Yeshua, means the Lord saves, and it is what the angel instructs Joseph to call him. Emmanuel is the prophetic title that explains what the saving consists of: not a message sent, but God present.

Is Emmanuel a suitable name for a child?

It has been used by Christians for centuries and across many languages. A name is not a claim, and no child has ever been burdened by carrying a good word.

The shortest summary of the faith

Every religion has a way of saying that heaven is interested in us. The distinctive claim here is smaller and much harder: not that God is watching, not that God sympathises, but that God came and stood in the room.

Isaiah said it to a king counting his water. Matthew said it over a birth in an occupied province, to people with no reason to expect good news. Both of them were speaking into the dark.

God with us. Not God above us, working out what to do. With us — in the noise, at the table, in the queue, at the hour we are most certain we are alone.

Related reading

• What Does Yahweh Mean?
• Prayers for God’s Presence
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names