Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Tory wrote:-

>If Isaiah had intended physical virginity to be clearly understood he
>would have undoubtedly wrote "woman/girl whom no man had known..."
>which is the manner in which the Hebrew author of Jdg. xxi 12
>expresses physical virginity so as to remove any possibility of doubt.

This is an assumption on your part. As such you can't elevate an
assumption to a fact. The Judges 21:12 can easily be read otherwise.
To insist that the author must have added ``whom no man had known''
to remove doubt is a reasonable assumption but no more reasonable
than believing the author was engaging in repitition for literary
effect. Part of the art of Hebrew poetry is in the skill of the
use of parallels. It was a well known art form and it is a reasonable
assumption the writer was thoroughly familiar with it. A
prose writer could also use this device. Since someone brought up
the question of how scholarship is done, a scholar should have
no difficulty in acknowledging uncertainly where uncertainly
exists. The reasons the writer had for adding ``whom no man had
known'' in Judges 21:12 are uncertain. And that's a certainty :-)

Bill Rea, ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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