Not all of us agree with BDB. Therefore you can't just cite BDB, you
...
Cow dung. There is simply no basis for the "generally should connote
a virgin" in your first sentence apart from a particular theology.
The commentary does not take Eigenbegrifflichkeit into account at
all, else the commentators would not have said "but not married" as
if almah cannot be used to describe a married woman, which is totally
false.
...
The word almah simply connotes youth, as does the masculine form, in
the TaNaK. But saying that youth is associated with virginity, while
true in almost every culture, is not a given in one where pre-teen
and teenage marriages are the norm. A female or male Israelite is no
longer considered an elem/almah after a certain age, not necessarily
after marriage or after they have had sex (cf. BDB s.v. elem, "young
man," almah, "maid or newly married").
....You are reading the modern Israeli tenses into Biblical Hebrew. Is
You keep reading "virgin" into almah without demonstrating that the
woman in Isa. vii 14 was that. Yet we know she is described as being
pregnant when Isaiah spoke to Ahaz because of the verbs. All you are
doing is forcing the text into a straight jacket because you seem
incapable of thinking of almah as anything but a physical virgin.
Tory Thorpe
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