Dear Tory,
HH: There's no biblical reference which indicates that "almah" describes
a married woman.
I supplied one unambiguous reference from The Song of Sol. You simply
choose to deny it because of your theology. If I supplied another
reference, you would undoubtedly deny that one as well and for the
same reason.
HH: Your reference is far from "unambiguous." There are queens and
concubines mentioned. Your assumption that alamoth were not virgins but
members of a harem would make them wives or concubines.
Concubines were not wives, so there is even less of a basis for thinking that "alamoth,
the third member of a list in Song of Solomon, were wives.
HH: The Bible says that his many wives that drew Solomon away from the
Lord. The Song of Solomon was written when he still had only 60 queens
and 80 concubines. Later he had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kgs
11:3). He was apparently young at the writing of the Song and had not
acquired all these wives and concubines yet.
You may be assuming that
the "alamoth without number" constituted part of the 700 wives he had,
but that is not a necessary assumption. If Solomon was married to a
woman, then she was a queen, by definition.
The Jews who translated the Septuagint in 200 B.C.E. or so evidently
felt that the word implied a
virgin.
False. The "Jews" who created the LXX did not restrict the meaning of
PARQENOS to physical virgins (cf. Gen. xxxiv 3). So you cannot say it
implies physical virginity in Isa. vii 14 even in the Greek version.
HH: Yes, there are exceptional cases with PARQENOS, but the word
generally means virgin...
But then the word evidently did not have this generic meaning for the
Alexandrian Jewish translators working in the 3rd century BCE. What
you said was that the "Jews" who created the LXX felt the word almah
implied a physical virgin. The example from Gen. xxxiv 3 (and
elsewhere) shows that you cannot make that deductive leap.
HH: The word PARQENOS is glossed as "virgin" in the lexicons. It
regularly means "virgin." Dinah had been a virgin until this guy raped
her. You seem to be trying to make an unusual case govern the meaning of
PARQENOS.
HH: There is a law requiring unmarried women to be virgins. And alamoth
were unmarried as far as we know.
HH: You have not shown that it refers to married women in biblical times.
HH: To me the word seems to be used of young women before they married.
HH: Nothing says the alamoth were part of Solomon's household. Nor does
anything require that Shulamith was not.
HH: Genesis 2 shows God's ideal for marriage. And it is only obvious and logical.
HH: I know the source language, and there aren't any main verbs in that
verse in the part where you are inserting a present tense. They have to
be supplied. It is a prophecy he is giving, so it can refer to the
future. By the way, the translators of these Bibles know the source
language. I refer to the translations precisely because the men who did
them were authorities in the language.
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