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  • From: Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] virginity
  • Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:02:22 -0400

On Jul 21, 2007, at 10:40 PM, Steve Miller wrote:

[Steve Miller] Tory,
Could you translate your Hebrew quotation, and explain when and by whom it
was written? Thanks,
-Steve Miller
Detroit
www.voiceInWilderness.info

Dear Steve,

This quote is from the Mishnah tractate Niddah i 4.

איזו היא בתולה כל שלא ראת דם מימיה אף על פי נשואה

My translation:

"Who is a BTWLH? She who has never yet experienced a flow of (menstrual) blood, even if she is married."

Danby's translation of the Mishnah, which usually renders BTWLH by the English word "virgin," leaves the word BTWLH untranslated at this point and with good reason: a girl below puberty is not a virgin if she has had intercourse in a marital relationship. An appropriate translation would be "pre-adolescent girl".

As for date and author, the text itself is not younger than the codification of the Mishnah by Rabbi Judah the Patriarch; but the lexical definition of BTWLH is probably much older than the Sages of the pre-tannaitic period (ca. 200 BCE–10 CE). I believe one can say that it is preexilic with a fair amount of confidence. Emphasis on physical virginity began to be placed on the Akkadian term BATULTU solely in the Neo-Babylonian period according to extant marriage documents (cf. A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, rev. ed. [Chicago, 1977], p. 77). But before the Neo-Babylonian period BATULTU was an age distinction for pre-nubile girls, and only implicitly for untouched virgins (cf. J. Finkelstein, "Sex Offenses in Sumerian Laws," JAOS 86 [1968], pp. 355-72). In the Mishnaic definition of BTWLH there is considerable overlap between an unmarried girl who is a virgin and a married girl who is no longer a physical virgin but who is still a pre-adolescent. This clearly harks back to the concept of pre-pubescence and the time when cognate Semitic terms were not restricted to the modern idea of virginity, i.e. BTWLH as pre- adolescent girl, married or unmarried, virgin or not, seems to have survived the semantic shift that occurred with BATULTU in the period of the Babylonian Exile.

HTH
Tory Thorpe



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