The meaning of ‘virgin’

Jesus the Jew, pg 219, by Geza Vermes

The meaning of ‘virgin’

A well-established usage of bethulah associates virginity, not with absence of sexual experience, but with an inability to conceive: a virgin is a girl who has not yet attained puberty. This sort of ‘virginity’ ends not with intercourse, but menstruation. Asking ‘Who is a virgin?’ the two earliest rabbinic codes, the Mishnah and Tosephta answer:

“Whoever has never seen blood even though she is married.”

The Tosephta, reflecting the teaching of the late-first-century CE Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, adds:

“I call a virgin whoever has never seen blood, even though she is married and has had children, until she has seen the first show.”

(a)The Palestinian Talmud goes ever further:
“Who is a virgin? According to the Mishnah, whoever has never seen blood even though she is married –She is said to be a virgin in respect of menstruation but not a virgin in respect of the token of virginity. Sometimes she is a virgin in the latter respect, but not a virgin in respect of menstruation.

(b) Marriage prior to puberty
It was possible, the evidence shows, for a girl to marry and cohabit with her husband before reaching puberty. In fact, it appears to have happened often enough to give rise to a dispute between the two leading rabbinic schools of the first century AD on the subject of whether a bloodstain on the wedding-night of a minor (i.e. a virgin in respect of menstruation) should be attributed to the rupture of the hymen or to her first period. The more rigorous House of Shammai settled for the first alternative for the first four nights only; the House of Hillel decided similarly but ‘until the healing of the wound’.

Another consequence of such a state of affairs was that a girl could conceive whilst still a ‘virgin’ in respect of menstruation, i.e. at the moment of her first ovulation. She could thus become a ‘virgin mother’. Indeed, in the event of her becoming pregnant a second time before menstruation, she could be, as Elizer ben Hyrcanus argues, the ‘virgin mother’ of several children!

In the Lucan version, by contrast, when told by an angel that she would conceive and bear the future Messiah, Mary asks:

“How can this be, for I know no man?”

On the lips of a girl described as betrothed – which in ancient Jewish law normally implied that she was a minor awaiting the right biological moment to change the status of wife – these words might be paraphrased: ‘How can this be, for I have not yet begun to menstruate? Should I nevertheless marry in spite of seeming not yet ready?’ To which the angel replies with the information that her cousin, who had passed the menopause and was technically ‘virgin’ once more, had also conceived, the implication being that the one achievement was not more unthinkable than the other:

‘Your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible.”

In both the Greek and Hebrew parlance of the Jews, the term ‘virgin’ was used elastically. It was certainly not confined to denoting men and women without experience of sexual intercourse. The Greek work could explicitly or implicitly include this meaning or the main stress could fall on the youth of a girl or boy, and generally, though not necessarily, on their unmarried state. As a matter of fact, Greek (and Latin) inscriptions found in the Jewish catacombs of Rome reveal that the word ‘virgin’ could apply, even after years of matrimony, to either a wife or a husband, probably implying that the marriage in question was his or her first one. A certain Argentia is described as having lived with her virgin husband for nine years; the wife of Germanus lived with her virgin husband for three years and three days. There is also mention of Irene, virgin wife of Clodius.

The implication is that the supposition was erroneous. But if so, why did Luke, and the tradition responsible for the genealogical table before him, waste their time compiling a sequence of irrelevant ancestors in order to trace Jesus’ lineage back to ‘Adam, the son of God’?