Virgin

A virgin, in biblical usage, is a person who has not had sexual intercourse, and the same word is used metaphorically for a city, people, or community pictured as a young woman not yet wed. The concept therefore carries both a literal, bodily sense and a corporate, figural one, and the two are often in play at once.

The Hebrew vocabulary matters here as a matter of established linguistic fact. In Isaiah 7:14 the word rendered "virgin" is almah, which denotes a young woman of marriageable age; betulah is the Hebrew term that more specifically signals virginity, and it is the word behind phrases such as "the virgin daughter of my people" (Jeremiah 14:17) and "O virgin of Israel" (Jeremiah 31:4). The Greek Old Testament translated the almah of Isaiah 7:14 with parthenos, the ordinary Greek word for a virgin, and Matthew 1:23 quotes that Greek form when it applies the verse to the birth of Jesus. The Hebrew text says what it says at Isaiah 7:14 — a young woman will conceive and bear a son called Immanuel — and the translation history is a separate, datable fact.

The metaphorical use is widespread in the passages themselves. Jeremiah addresses the capital and the nation as a "virgin daughter" wounded and broken (Jeremiah 14:17), promises that "the virgin of Israel" will again be built and dance with tambourines (Jeremiah 31:4), and pictures "the virgin" rejoicing in the dance when mourning is turned to joy (Jeremiah 31:13). Isaiah 62:5 sets a young man's marriage to a virgin alongside God's rejoicing over his people. One way to read this imagery is that virginity conveys not mainly sexual status but the freshness, vulnerability, and unconsummated belonging of a city or people — an unplundered daughter, a bride not yet claimed. In the New Testament the same figurative potential is used corporately: Paul says he betrothed the Corinthian church "as a pure virgin to Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:2), and the parable of the ten virgins awaiting the bridegroom turns on readiness for an unidentified hour (Matthew 25:1, 10, 12–13). Revelation 14:4 describes the redeemed as those "not defiled with women, for they are virgins," a line interpreters have taken either as literal sexual abstinence or as cultic purity and undivided allegiance to the Lamb.

Traditions read the term differently, and the differences are worth naming plainly. In Christian teaching Isaiah 7:14 is read in light of Matthew 1:23 as a prophecy of the virginal conception, a doctrine confessed in the ancient creeds; Jewish reading has generally taken almah as simply "young woman" and the sign as addressed to Ahaz's own crisis, and some modern historical-critical interpreters likewise distinguish the Hebrew word from the Greek. Within Christianity, Revelation 14:4 has been read literally by ascetic and monastic traditions that prized consecrated virginity, and figuratively by those who hear in it a call to freedom from idolatry; 2 Corinthians 11:2 is read by some as nuptial mysticism and by others as a straightforward warning against doctrinal seduction.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.