Lexicon

H1330 - bethulah

Strong's: H1330 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: beth-oo-law' Part of speech: feminine noun Frequency: ~50 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, concentrated in Deuteronomy, Judges, Esther, Lamentations, Joel, Amos, the Servant Songs of Isaiah, and figurative uses ("virgin daughter of Zion / Jerusalem / Israel"). LXX equivalent: παρθένος (parthenos, virgin). See G3933 - parthenos. Companion / contrast term: H5959 - almah (almah, young woman of marriageable age, virginity strongly implied by cultural context).

Semantic range (Brown-Driver-Briggs / HALOT)

Virgin (technical-legal sense), the primary lexical sense; specifies a sexually inexperienced young woman, typically of marriageable age but not yet married.
Young woman / maiden, broader cultural-positional sense; some occurrences (esp. figurative) appear to use bethulah as functionally equivalent to "young woman" without strict virginity-emphasis (the contested cases below).
Figurative, "virgin daughter of [place]", symbolic usage: "the virgin daughter of Zion / Jerusalem / Israel / Egypt / Babylon / Sidon", personification of a city or nation as a young (often-violated, often-mourning) maiden.

Theological force, the technical virginity term and its limits

Bethulah is the Hebrew Bible's most technical virginity-term, the word that appears in legal contexts requiring or specifying virgin status:

Deuteronomy 22:13-21, virginity-of-the-bride disputes ("the bethulim of my daughter", the tokens of virginity)
Deuteronomy 22:23-29, sexual-violation laws applying to a bethulah betrothed
Leviticus 21:13-14, the high priest must marry a bethulah
Exodus 22:16-17, the bethulah who is seduced; bride-price obligation
Ezekiel 44:22, the post-exilic priest must marry a bethulah

In these legal contexts, bethulah unambiguously specifies sexual inexperience. It is the word the law reaches for when virginity is the legal point at issue.

The complication. Bethulah is not always used with strict-virginity implication in narrative or figurative contexts. Two passages cause complications:

Joel 1:8, "wail like a bethulah girded with sackcloth for the baʿal of her youth", the baʿal (husband) implies a married woman; the bethulah here mourns a deceased husband. This appears to use bethulah of someone not a virgin in the strict-modern sense, suggesting bethulah could carry the broader "young-woman" sense in mourning-poetry.
Genesis 24:16, Rebekah described as "a naʿarah very beautiful, a bethulah, and no man had had relations with her", the explanatory "no man had had relations with her" appears to clarify bethulah (suggesting bethulah alone might not fully specify virginity for the writer's audience). Some scholars read the clarifying clause as redundant (Skinner, ICC); others as defining (Hamilton, NICOT).

The Isaiah 7:14 question. Why didn't Isaiah use bethulah (the technical-virginity term) instead of almah (the young-woman-with-implied-virginity term) if the Christian / LXX virgin-conception reading is correct?

The standard Christian-conservative answer: Isaiah's word-choice is deliberate and theologically significant.

Bethulah in legal contexts had become the legal-technical term, but its cultural / poetic / mourning-context uses (esp. Joel 1:8) introduced ambiguity.
Almah, by contrast, is the term for a young unmarried woman of marriageable age, culturally always presumed a virgin, never (in the 9 OT occurrences) clearly used of a non-virgin.
Isaiah's choice of almah over bethulah selects the term whose semantic range guarantees youth-and-availability while implying virginity through the cultural shape of "unmarried young woman of marriageable age." The LXX translators (3rd-2nd c. BC) recognized this and rendered with parthenos.

The bethulah-could-also-mean-young-woman complication, paradoxically, strengthens rather than weakens the Christian reading: had Isaiah used bethulah, the Joel 1:8 / Gen 24:16 cases would have given Jewish polemicists more lexical room to argue the term was non-virgin-specific. Isaiah's almah is the cleaner term for the unambiguous "unmarried virgin-presumed" sense.

Notable verses

Legal / technical-virginity contexts

Deuteronomy 22:13-21, virginity-of-the-bride disputes; "the bethulim of my daughter"
Deuteronomy 22:23-29, sexual-violation laws
Leviticus 21:13-14, high priest marrying a bethulah
Exodus 22:16-17, seduced bethulah; bride-price
Ezekiel 44:22, post-exilic priestly marriage requirements

Narrative / non-legal contexts

Genesis 24:16, Rebekah ("a bethulah, and no man had had relations with her")
Judges 11:37-38, Jephthah's daughter mourning her bethulim (her virginal state) before her vow-fulfillment
Judges 19:24; 21:12, narrative virginity-references
2 Samuel 13:2, 18, Tamar; the royal bethulah tradition
1 Kings 1:2, David's bedside attendant (Abishag, a bethulah)
Esther 2:2-3, 17, 19, the harem assembly; bethulot

The complication passage

Joel 1:8, "wail like a bethulah girded with sackcloth for the baʿal of her youth", the most-discussed counter-example to strict-virginity reading

Figurative, "virgin daughter of..."

Isaiah 23:12; 37:22; 47:1, bethulat-bat-Tzidon / bat-Tziyyon / bat-Bavel
Jeremiah 14:17; 18:13; 31:4, 21; 46:11, bethulat bat-ami / Yisrael / Mitzraim
Lamentations 1:15; 2:13, bethulat bat-Yehudah / bat-Tziyyon
Amos 5:2, "fallen, no more to rise, is the bethulat Yisrael"

NT / LXX

2 Corinthians 11:2, "I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure parthenos", the figurative "virgin daughter" tradition activated for the church

Patristic / scholarly note

The bethulah-vs-almah debate has been the central exegetical battleground for the Isaiah 7:14 / Matthew 1:23 prophecy-fulfillment for two millennia.

Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho 71-72), Trypho objects that Isaiah used almah, not bethulah; Justin replies that the LXX (a Jewish pre-Christian translation) renders almah with parthenos, ratifying the virginity-implication. Origen (Contra Celsum I.34), defends the parthenos reading on lexical and contextual grounds. Jerome (Commentary on Isaiah III), extensive Hebrew lexical engagement.

Edward J. Young (The Book of Isaiah NICOT, 1965), defends Isaiah's choice of almah over bethulah as theologically deliberate: the term whose semantic range guarantees unmarried-young-woman without the legal-technical ambiguity of bethulah. J.A. Motyer (The Prophecy of Isaiah, 1993), the cleanest contemporary defense of the virginity-implication.

The Cyrus Gordon proposal, that almah in Isaiah 7:14 is borrowed from a Ugaritic cognate (ǵalmatu) used in goddess-bride-mythology contexts (the "young goddess gives birth to..." formula); thus Isaiah 7:14 deliberately echoes a virgin-deity-conceiving template. This is not mainstream but provides ANE comparative-linguistic support for the virginity-implied reading.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. Anchors: Genesis 24:16 (Rebekah, with explanatory clause); Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (legal-virginity); Joel 1:8 (the complication); the figurative "virgin daughter of" tradition.