Isaiah’s scene is political theater disguised as piety: Achaz refuses a sign with a sanctimonious “I will not tempt,” which is less reverence than a way to keep his options open. The prophet’s retort is basically: you’ve already exhausted human patience, now you’re trying it with God too. The “sign” offered is thus not a party trick but an unavoidable disclosure: God will write His verdict into dynastic biology. That’s the barbed genius of “unto the depth…unto the height”: Achaz is invited to name the terms of reality, and his refusal is itself the indictment. Read straussianly, the virgin-conception motif functions on two registers: exoteric wonder-story and esoteric legitimating device. Exoterically it is the scandalous miracle; esoterically it is a claim about sovereignty: the Davidic line will be restored not by Achaz’s diplomacy but by an unpurchased begetting, a kingship not brokered. The sign is aimed at the “house of David,” not merely Achaz: i.e., the problem isn’t one cowardly ruler but a corrupted principle of rule. Luke then executes a kind of literary transubstantiation: Isaiah’s cryptic dynastic sign becomes a personal annunciation, and the “house of David” gets narrowed from institution to womb. The angel’s rhetoric is courtly, but the drama is consent. Mary is “troubled” not by the content but by the form—she suspects language itself. That’s psychologically sharp and theologically convenient: it frames her as discerning rather than credulous, which is precisely what a community under intellectual pressure would want in its exemplary figure. The pivotal line is her question: “How shall this be done, because I know not man?” It is simultaneously modest, legalistic, and metaphysical. She doesn’t say “No,” she asks about mechanism. That makes her the anti-Achaz: he refuses a sign to preserve agency; she requests clarification and then yields agency. Both are offered an encounter with the divine; one hides behind piety, the other uses reason as a staircase to obedience. “Overshadow” is doing a lot of work: it evokes temple-cloud and ark imagery, turning Mary into a mobile sanctuary. If that strikes you as too neat, it’s because it is; Luke is composing typology with the confidence of someone who already knows the ending. The text is less reportage than liturgical architecture. Also note the subtle political claim: “throne of David…kingdom…no end.” This is not a private spiritualism; it is an imperial counter-myth expressed in lullaby diction. In an occupied province, declaring an endless Davidic reign is either dangerous naiveté or calculated irony. The Gospel’s brilliance is that it can be read as harmless devotion by the inattentive and as sedition by the initiated. Critically: the Isaiah prooftext is not clean. The Hebrew ‘almah is not a technical “virgin,” and Isaiah’s immediate horizon likely involves a nearer-term sign. Christianity’s move is not philological but hermeneutic: it treats history as layered, where a local omen can be a long-range cipher. If you demand modern standards of authorial intent, the argument wobbles; if you grant prophetic text the right to mean more than it first meant, it becomes almost inevitable. Juxtaposed, the pair gives you a theology of legitimacy: God does not merely predict; He overrules the usual channels of power—alliances, lineage management, male agency—by inserting a “sign” that is both child and claim. Achaz tries to manage God; Mary lets God manage her. That’s the unflattering mirror: one posture is religiosity as control, the other is freedom as surrender.