young womanhood: the state of a girl old enough to marry but not yet married, together with the sexual innocence presumed to go with it
This is an abstract plural word, formed like the Hebrew words for "youth" and "old age." It names a stage of a woman's life rather than a single physical fact, and it bundles together several things English keeps apart:
- being an adolescent
- being old enough to marry
- still living in her father's house
- the sexual innocence presumed of a daughter there
The related word betulah (בְּתוּלָה) names the young woman herself; this word names the state she is in, or the evidence of it.
Because the word bundles so much, different passages lean on different parts of it. When Jephthah's daughter weeps for hers on the mountains, or when Ezekiel speaks of the breasts of two sisters' youth, the word points to the life-stage, since strict virginity is beside the point or even impossible in the scene. When a priest must marry a woman while she is still in hers, or when a husband disputes what he found on the wedding night, the sexual-innocence part comes to the front.
The older English gloss "virginity" mistook one prominent part of the bundle for the whole. Hebrew law still needed a separate phrase, "no man had known her," to state physical virginity plainly, which shows the word by itself did not carry that precise sense. Later Jewish tradition narrowed it much further, into a monetized token of wedding-night bloodstains, but the Bible itself does not go that far.
Nuances
What the cloth spread before the elders in the trial of an accused bride actually proves, and therefore what betulim denotes in this law.
- majorityA bloodstained wedding-night sheet demonstrating physical virginity through a ruptured hymen; the betulim are the tokens of intactness.; Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary, 204-207; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, "Virginity in the Bible," in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, JSOTSup 262 (1998); Carolyn Pressler, The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws, BZAW 216
- minorityThe bride's last menstrual cloth before the wedding, proving she was not already pregnant by another man, so that the charge concerns illicit pregnancy rather than lost virginity.; Gordon J. Wenham, "Bethulah 'A Girl of Marriageable Age,'" Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972): 326-348; Tom Wadsworth, Restoration Quarterly 23 (1980): 161-171
- minorityA property dispute between men, the husband suing the father-in-law for return of the double bride-price, which sidesteps the physical question altogether.; Bruce Wells, "Sex, Lies, and Virginal Rape," Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 41-72; Cynthia Edenburg, Journal of Biblical Literature 128 (2009): 43-60
Disputed
Whether betulim is a technical term for physical virginity (or its tokens) or a broader word for the age and status of a marriageable young woman.
- majorityA broad age-and-status term for adolescent, marriageable young-womanhood; the presumption of sexual innocence is a social implication of a daughter still under her father's roof, not the word's core meaning.; Gordon J. Wenham, "Bethulah 'A Girl of Marriageable Age,'" Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972): 326-348; Matitiahu Tsevat, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament 2:338-343; David J. A. Clines, Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v.; Clemens Locher and John H. Walton, New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, s.v.
- minorityThe age-and-status philology holds, but in legal and priestly texts virginity is so strongly implied that it is effectively part of the word's meaning.; Richard M. Davidson, Flame of Yahweh (2007), 337-361; Gordon P. Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant, VTSup 52; Bruce K. Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament 1:295-296
- minorityA technical term for physical virginity and its tokens, as in the older lexica.; BDB, s.v., 143