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  • From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>
  • To: Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com>
  • Cc: B Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] virginity
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:34:50 -0400

Tory,

It appears to me that the "Ugaritic" word glmt = galmat? you are quoting below is from the root GLM, 'to have shape, to have body, to be compact'. The word ends in the personal pronoun AT for the woman itself. The word GOLEM, 'fetus', of Psalms 139:16 is one of the words derived from this root. The root GLM is of the root family BLM, KLM, CLM, SLM, $LM [hence the name $ULAMIT of Songs 7:1, in which both the U and the IT are personal pronouns] and TLM.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Jul 18, 2007, at 9:45 PM, Tory Thorpe wrote:

Dear Bill,

On Jul 18, 2007, at 6:03 PM, Bill Rea wrote:

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.

It is more than merely an assumption when one considers, for example,
the annunciation formula in the Hymn of Nikkal from Ugarit: hl glmt
tld bn, "Look, the almah will give birth to a son" (UT 77:7). This is
strikingly similar to Isa. vii 14. Ugarit and ancient Israel shared a
conventional idiom, but used it differently. Cyrus H. Gordon always
rendered glmt (= almah) in Ugaritic texts by "maid" and never
"virgin" since another text from Ugarit puts glmt in parallelism with
'att ("wife"), thus showing that the two are synonymous terms. The
implication is that the etymological counterpart of Ugaritic glmt in
BH may also be applied to a young wife. Gordon wrote: "almah means a
'young woman' who may be a virgin, but is not necessarily so" (JBL 21
[1953], p. 106). I don't think its possible to be more nonpartisan
than that given the evidence currently available. Nothing has really
changed since H. Schultz, Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh, 1892),
II p. 414, agreed with the rabbinic understanding that almah has to
do with years of age, not marital status or chastity per se.

One needs to evaluate your assertion that the negative expressions in
Gen. xxiv 16 and Jdg. xxi 12 were added by the biblical author merely
for literary effect against the evidence from Sumerian and Akkadian.
Similar negative expressions are used in these languages; there is no
single word for "virgin". There is no one word for "virgin" in
Ugaritic or in Mishnaic Hebrew. I would also add Biblical Hebrew
because of the way betulah is defined in the Mishnah and in the
cognate languages of the ancient Near East. In this instance at
least, I could cite others, the Mishnaic Hebrew illumines the BH. For
other examples, see R. Gordis "Studies in the Relationship of
Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew" Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volumes (New
York, 1946), pp. 173-200; idem, "Biblical Hebrew in Light of Rabbinic
Usage" in Sepher Tur-Sinai (Jerusalem, 1961), pp. 149-167.

Tory Thorpe
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