had promised to his people. So says the Talmud.
But further; as to the birth of the Messias, in respect of the manner and the place, it is thus set down by the prophet Micah, v. 2. And thou Bethlehem Ephrata, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me, that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been of old, even from everlasting.—And in Isa. vii. 14. are these words, Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bring forth a son, and call his name Immanuel. In these two texts, (the Christians say) the place of the birth of the Messias, and the manner of it, are as plainly described as words can do; and if they cannot, without absurdity, be explained as relating to any other person, then it must be perverting the meaning of the records, to oppose this explication: but this the Jews are far from doing. The place is acknowledged in the Talmud, in the Chaldee paraphrase of Jonathan, and all their most famous masters declare with one voice, that Bethlehem indisputably belongs to the Messias. Exte Bethlehem coram me prodibit Messias, ut sit dominium exercens in Israel, cujus nomen dictum est ab aeternitate, a Diebus seculi. (Talmud. lib. Sanhedrim, et Midrasch. The hillinic Rabbi Selemoh. paraph. Jonath. in Loc. Rabbi David Kimchi.)—And as to

the manner, tho' it be true that some Jews say, the Hebrew word Gnalma signifies a young woman as well as a virgin; yet Kimell, Jarchi, and Selemoh, three of their greatest Rabbins, confess that here is something wonderful presaged in the birth and generation of this person, and that he was not to be born as other men and women are born. What can we desire more, in the case, from an enemy? And in truth, the behold, or wonder, with which the text begins, would be nothing, if it was only that a young woman should have a child: — and as to the Hebrew word Gnalmah, if it ever does signify a young women, which I very much doubt, yet in the translation of the Seventy, who well understood the original surely, they render the word by parthenos,〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉in Graec; which always signifies a virgin in the strict propriety of the phrase. And in the Punic language, which is much the same as the Hebrew, the word Alma signifies a virgin, virgo intacta, and never