Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Raymond,
> Harold R. Holmyard III <hholmyard AT ont.com> wrote on 30-01-2001 00:56:
> 
> > Dear Dave,
> > 
> > You say:
> > 
> >> That said, the oft-repeated argument about `almah meaning "young
> >> woman [of marriageable age]" AS OPPOSED to "virgin" seems
> >> equally artificial to me; wouldn't a "young woman of marriageable
> >> age" be expected to be a virgin in that culture?
> > 
> > This is the position I took in the paper on I mentioned. But I added a
> > Ugaritic reference suggesting virgin as a meaning for the Ugaritic cognate
> > to Hebrew "almah."
> > 
> > Yours,
> > Harold Holmyard
> > 
> 
> Dear Harold,
> 
> I read your excursus in the paper you mentioned, but the Ugaritic cognate
> >Glmt< does not help in this case, because it has the same problems as 
> >(almah
> has in Hebrew. It denotes a young woman in this case, and in the case of KTU
> 1.24 it might refer indeed to a woman who is going to be married (the bride
> price has still to be paid).
> 
> However, >Glmt< is also used for the goddesses (Anatu and probably (Athtartu
> who were married to Ba(lu. >Glmt< is used as a parallel epithet to >btlt<
> and since the mythic texts of Ugarit indicate that (Anatu is not a virgin,
> the Ugaritic cognate has to be dismissed as evidence for (almah meaning
> "virgin". 

Hardly.  The profuse use of the phrase "the virgin `anat" suggests 
that it is a formulaic title, not a descriptive term.  Much the same 
as the Roman Catholic church uses the phrase "The Virgin Mary" 
even though we know from the gospels that she had other children 
and hence apparently lived a normal married life after Jesus 
(assuming the Christian approach, of course, purely for the sake of 
argument - I'll add that disclaimer so I don't get jumped on).  If 
you're going to argue away the Ugaritic evidence, you'll have to 
demonstrate its use from non-formulaic texts, a category into 
which the formulaic names for `anat do not fall.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever
tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be
violated."  C. S. Lewis