PARQENOS (again)

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Tue Feb 8 07:21:51 EST 2000


To: Vince Endris,

<< I may be bringing up a question that has already been answered, but I 
must have missed it. This is concerning the question of PARQENOS at the 
time of Septuagint translation. One answer that was given, I must admit I 
did not understand it all (I am a little greeker), is that it may refer to 
"unmarried women who are not virgins". This seems like it would make more 
sense unless there were legends of a virgin birth at the time of Isaiah 
(question mark). >>

I suspect that "virgin birth" stories have been popular since the beginning 
of time. My wife (who is an OB-GYN) tells a story where she was having a 
very young pregnant woman (girl?) wheeled down to the delivery room and in 
the hallway this "young woman" yells out to her mother (something to the 
effect): "I don't care what these doctors tell you, I've never had sex with 
any man." Shortly after making that statement, she gave birth to a 
child.  Most OB-GYN physicians can tell a couple stories like this.

"Virgin birth" stories were common in Roman and Greek circles, I don't know 
how common they might have been in early Jewish circles, but I suspect that 
they had heard of some. As for PARQENOS, like many words it has more than 
one meaning, it can be used merely to refer to a  "young woman," or it can 
be used in a technical sense to refer to a "virgin." This word by itself 
cannot tell us if the LXX translator(s) understood the Hebrew text one way 
or the other.

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com
FWIW: I'm neither a clergy-person, nor an academic (and I have no post-grad 
degrees).




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