What Does Emmanuel Mean? “God With Us” in Isaiah and Matthew

Emmanuel means “God with us”. It is the Hebrew name Immanuel, made of immanu, “with us”, and El, “God”, and in those two Hebrew words it says what the whole of Christmas says.

Isaiah gave it as the name of a child who would be a sign (Isaiah 7:14), and Matthew says the sign was fulfilled when Jesus was born: “they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matthew 1:23). Matthew stops to translate the name, so that none of his readers would miss what it claims.

He puts those words near the start of his Gospel, and he ends it with Jesus promising the same thing in his own voice. On a mountain in Galilee, after the resurrection, Jesus sends his disciples to “teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19) and tells them he will be with them always, “even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). The name the prophet gave and the promise the risen Lord made are one promise. God has come to be with us, and he stays.

Where does Emmanuel appear in the Bible?

For a name sung every Advent, Emmanuel comes only three times in the Bible, twice in Isaiah and once in Matthew, and Isaiah 8:10 says its words as a sentence, “God is with us”. The King James Version spells it “Immanuel” in Isaiah and “Emmanuel” in Matthew.

Isaiah speaks the name again in the next chapter, into a flood. He warns that the king of Assyria will come like a river that bursts its banks, and “he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel” (Isaiah 8:8). Two verses later he turns on the nations who plot against Judah: “Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand: for God is with us” (Isaiah 8:10). The water reaches the neck, and the land is still Immanuel’s. When the water comes up that high in our own lives, the land is still his.

What was the sign Isaiah gave to Ahaz?

The name first comes in a time of fear, when Rezin, king of Syria, and Pekah, king of Israel, had marched on Jerusalem. When the news reached the house of David, “his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind” (Isaiah 7:2). God sent Isaiah to meet King Ahaz “at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller’s field” (Isaiah 7:3), and told Ahaz to ask for a sign, as deep or as high as he liked. Ahaz would not: “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord” (Isaiah 7:12).

Isaiah answered him with a sign Ahaz had refused to ask for: “Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:13–14). Before that child was old enough “to refuse the evil, and choose the good”, the two kings Ahaz feared would be gone (Isaiah 7:16). The New American Bible’s note reads the sign as God reassuring Ahaz in the light of his promise to David. A frightened king who would not ask was given a child whose very name told him that God was with his people.

Readers have long asked who that child was. The Hebrew word Isaiah uses, almah, means a young woman of marriageable age; the Jewish translators who put Isaiah into Greek chose parthenos, which normally means a virgin, and Matthew quotes their Greek. Jewish commentators such as Rashi, in the eleventh century, read the young woman as the prophet’s own wife and the sign as a child born in Ahaz’s day; the word and both readings are set out more fully with the Isaiah verses that foretell Jesus’ birth. Christians read the sign, with Matthew, as fulfilled in Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary. A sign given to a frightened king for the troubles of his own day was holding something back, and when Mary’s son was born, Matthew saw God give it in full.

Is it Emmanuel or Immanuel?

Both, and they are the same name; the spellings only show the road it travelled. Isaiah wrote in Hebrew and Matthew in Greek, where the name is Emmanouēl. The King James Version follows each: Immanuel in Isaiah, Emmanuel in Matthew. Others choose one spelling for both. The Catholic Douay-Rheims and New American Bible have Emmanuel even in Isaiah 7:14, and the New American Standard Bible has Immanuel even in Matthew. Whichever spelling we sing, we are calling him by the same two Hebrew words.

If Jesus is Emmanuel, why was he named Jesus?

The angel gave Joseph the name to use: “She shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Two verses later Matthew quotes Isaiah’s Emmanuel, and two verses after that Joseph does as he was told: “he called his name Jesus” (Matthew 1:25). The name Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Yehoshua, Joshua, which means “Yahweh saves”; more on it is in Jesus’ name in Hebrew, Yeshua. So within five verses Matthew sets the two names side by side, one saying what the child came to do and the other saying who has come.

John Chrysostom, preaching on this chapter of Matthew, put the same question and answered it from Matthew’s own words: “How was it then, one may say, that His name was not called Emmanuel, but Jesus Christ? Because he said not, you shall call, but they shall call, that is, the multitude, and the issue of events. For here he puts the event as a name: and this is customary in Scripture, to substitute the events that take place for names. Therefore, to say, they shall call Him Emmanuel, means nothing else than that they shall see God among men. For He has indeed always been among men, but never so manifestly.”

Jesus is the name Joseph gave him, as the angel said. Emmanuel is what everyone who met him would come to say of him, and what we say of him still. We belong to Chrysostom’s multitude whenever we call him by that name.

Emmanuel as a given name

Christians have given the name to their children for centuries, and to name a child Emmanuel is to say over the cradle what Isaiah said over Judah. In England it has been used since the sixteenth century, spelled both Emmanuel and Immanuel, though never widely. It has been far more common in Spain and Portugal as Manuel and Manoel, and two Byzantine emperors bore it as Manuel. Other forms include Emanuele in Italian, Emanuel in German, and the feminine Emmanuelle in French and Manuela in Spanish and Portuguese. Every Manuel and Manuela carries Isaiah’s sign, shortened.

Why is Emmanuel sung at Christmas?

In the last week of Advent the Roman Church calls on Christ by this name. Since at least the eighth century it has sung seven short prayers to him, the “O Antiphons”, at Evening Prayer on the seven days from 17 to 23 December, each calling him by an image drawn from the Old Testament’s hopes for the Messiah. The last, on 23 December, two nights before Christmas, is “O Emmanuel, our King and Giver of Law: come to save us, Lord our God!” After six evenings of the old images, the week of prayer comes to rest on the name that says he is with us. The hymn “O come, O come, Emmanuel” grew from these antiphons; its Latin text was first printed in Cologne in 1710, and John Mason Neale put it into English in 1851.

What does “God with us” mean for us?

John says what Matthew says in other words: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). And near the close of the last book of the Bible the promise is made whole, when a great voice from heaven says, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God” (Revelation 21:3).

Ahaz was afraid and would not ask for a sign, and God gave him one anyway. We are given the same name in our own fears, and the one who bears it has promised not to leave: “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).

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