[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.