Audio Set: Discovering the Septuagint

This is not a new review. Please replace my previous review with the corrected one below the ——–. I had a mistake in my last paragraph. As you can see, I do not know Greek. thank you.
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Bercot is easy and enjoyable to listen to. He is direct, has thought things out from many angles, yet simple and humble. This gave me a new view of the Septuagint, which I will now read, and read it with a lot more respect.
I disagree with Bercot on only 2 details:
1) The Hebrew word “almah” does mean “virgin”. The root of the word means “unknown”, meaning “innocent young woman”. In the Hebrew Bible the intimate physical relation between a husband and wife is described with the verb “know”. The usage of “almah” in Song of Songs 1:3 & 6:8 require the meaning of “virgin”. The Orthodox Jewish translation, the Stone Tanach, which is a good literal translation except for being very biased against Christ, tries very hard to translate “almah” as “young woman” throughout, but could not do that in SoS 1:3 & 6:8, so they had to twist it and translate “almah” as “nations”, which it never means.
“Almah” is the only Hebrew word that unambiguously means “virgin”. “Betulah”, which Bercot says means “virgin”, has the root meaning of “separated” and means a proper woman who either is a virgin, or was a virgin before marriage and has remained married to one husband (Joel 1:8; Esth 2:17, 19; Deu 22:15-16). Any time that “betulah” is used to mean “virgin”, it is always modified such as in Gen 24:16 “a betulah AND no man had known her”.
Bercot said that what convinced him that “almah” means just “young woman” was that the maie form, “alam” (1Sam 17:56; 20:22) just means “young man” with no reference to virginity. The maie form need not have the same emphasis as the female. “alam” means a young innocent unmarried man. In 1Sam 17:56 the emphasis is that young unmarried David is an unknown, a mystery, and in 20:22 the meaning is that the young arrow-fetcher is innocent as to what is going on. This is also very interesting because Bercot argues, very well, (which was new to me) that 1Sam 17:55-18:5 is not in the original. It is not in LXX, and there is absolutely no way to reconcile it with the end of the previous chapter. Why was this strange and troublesome story added to the text? I believe it was a story in existence outside the inspired Bible, and scribe(s) added it to the Bible after the time of Christ in order to support that “almah” means “young woman” and not “virgin”. It was chosen by the committee because of their desire to have almah not mean “virgin”.

2) Matthew 1:23 did not take his translation of Isa 7:14 from LXX. There is an extremely important difference. LXX matches MT Isa 7:14. The MT literally says “and you (2nd person feminine singular) shall call his name Immanuel”, which does not make sense because Isaiah is not talking to a woman. Because it doesn’t make sense, English translators translate it as “she shall call”, which is not what it says. LXX literally also says “and you (2nd person common singular) shall call”. Matthew, however, says “they shall call”. A famous rabbi, Rabbi Tovia Singer, argued correctly that “She shall call” means the mother shall call the son “God with us” which could just mean that at the time of the birth, she felt that God was with Israel. However “they shall call” means that many other unnamed people will call his name “God with us”, which means that that is what the son really is – the son is actually God with us. The rabbi, of course, condemned Matthew for such “paganism”. A little later, the Dead Sea Scrolls were made public, and the Dead Sea Scrolls exactly match Matthew 1:23. Apparently, some Jewish leaders, before the time of the LXX, preferred the mistaken and nonsensical “you (feminine singular) shall call” over “they shall call” because they knew the implications of “they shall call” and thought that to be heresy.