Dr. Michael Brown is a Jewish believer in the Christian Messiah (Jesus). He is very active in promoting his belief among Jews with books, videos, and other means to try to get the Jews into Christianity. These people are called ‘missionaries’.
On the other side, in Orthodox Judaism, we find people who are called ‘counter-missionaries’, countering the missionary efforts who try to convert Jews to Christianity. A well-known counter-missionary is Rabbi Tovia Singer.
Needless to say, there are many videos on the internet where statements of the ‘other side’ are being discussed. I side with Orthodox Judaism.
In the next video, Dr. Michael Brown discusses statements made by Rabbi Tovia Singer.
This article is my opinion on Dr. Michael Brown’s arguments why Rabbi Tovia Singer’s claims are ‘bizarre’. It is not in defense of Rabbi Tovia Singer, he is well capable of doing that himself, should he feel the need for that.
In this series, without being disrespectful to both gentlemen, I will use ‘Brown’ and ‘Singer’ for convenience. This is part 2.
In the video, Brown accuses Singer of making what Brown calls ‘the most bizarre statements made at all’. They are:
* Singer claims that ONLY the Pentateuch was translated into Greek at the time of Jesus, and all the other books later, with even Christian influences (at 1:44 and repeated at 3:24).
* The Hebrew word ‘betulah’ always means ‘virgin’ (at 3:29 and 8:10).
In this post, I will address Brown’s rebuttal to Singer’s second statement.
Brown counters Singer with his statement (at 8:10) that the Hebrew word ‘betulah’ ONLY means ‘virgin’ in Jewish Law. Brown (at 8:32): ‘Otherwise, it needs qualification; otherwise, in and of itself, it does not mean virgin. There is no one Hebrew word which, in and of itself, without any other qualifier, explicitly means virgin.’
As a proof, Brown continues (at 8:58) by stating that ‘betulah’ in the Hebrew scriptures, more often than not, has no reference to virginity, but simply means ‘young woman’ or ‘maiden’. Then Brown continues to say that of the fifty times that ‘betulah’ occurs in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible or ‘Old’ Testament), the NJPSV, the New Jewish Publication Society Version (or NJPS) of the Tanakh, translates ‘maiden’ rather than ‘virgin’ thirty-one times, and that this NJPSV translation is the most widely used Jewish translation of our day. Brown does NOT tell you that this translation is widely used across Progressive and Conservative Judaism, the more liberal iterations of Judaism, and not by traditional Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism, including Singer, who opposes Browns positions. However, Brown continues by saying that even the ArtScroll Stone Edition, reflecting traditional Orthodox scholarship, frequently translates as ‘maiden’ as well.
It this translation a problem? ‘Maiden’ in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is described as: ‘a girl or young woman who is not married’. It is safe to consider these women in the time of the Tanakh to be virgins before marriage. Although ‘virgin’ is a clear indication of not having had any intercourse and of sexual purity, the scope of ‘maiden’ is the same! BTW, if you check out how ‘betulah’ is translated in English Bible translations on BibleHub, the overwhelming majority is ‘virgin’, followed by ‘maiden’. This weakens Brown’s statement that ‘betulah’ ‘more often than not, has no reference to virginity’!
And why would ‘betulah’ outside of the Jewish Law suddenly not mean a virgin? Is that also the case with a ‘blasphemer ’, for instance? Or with a ‘prophet’? I would suggest that the meaning of a word in the Law would certainly be the same throughout the rest of Tanakh; it is the definition that is laid down in the Law.
But as a proof for his position, Brown refers to Genesis 24:16 (ASV):
‘And the damsel (Rebecca) was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the fountain, and filled her pitcher, and came up.’
Brown argues that ‘betulah’ is indeed translated into ‘virgin’, but here, outside of Jewish Law, it does not really mean virgin. Why then would it be followed with the phrase ‘neither had any man known her’, had intercourse with her? Brown argues that this phrase serves as a qualifier to ‘virgin’, so that ‘betulah’ really means ‘virgin’ in THIS passage.
One of the tactics of Christian missionaries, including Brown, is that they often refer to Jewish literature outside of the Tanakh, such as the Talmud and Jewish commentators like Rashi, when defending their statements and doctrines when it is convenient. This even though Christians do not consider these sources authoritative. It is striking that the foremost Jewish commentator of all, Rashi, sheds more light on this passage, and that Brown does not mention Rashi’s comment on this passage now!
The comment comes from the Judaica Press Complete Tanach translation into English on https://www.chabad.org:
‘Now the maiden was of very comely appearance, a virgin, and no man had been intimate with her, and she went down to the fountain, and she filled her pitcher and went up.’
Rashi’s commentary:
a virgin. from the place of her virginity. — [Gen. Rabbah 60:5]
and no man had been intimate with her. in an unnatural way. Since the daughters of the Gentiles would preserve their virginity but were promiscuous in unnatural ways, Scripture attests that she was completely innocent. — [Gen. Rabbah ad loc.]
This means that her virginity is not questioned by Rashi; it is already established by the word ‘betulah’. The added phrase, ‘and no man had been intimate with her’, raises her sexual modesty to an even higher level, as befitting a matriarch of the Jewish people! Brown will not tell you this. He is cherry-picking the Jewish literature when it supports his ideas, but ignoring them when they do not fit.
Brown’s ‘qualifier’ appears only TWO times in Tanakh, here in Genesis 24:16, and in Judges 21:12. Is Brown then really suggesting that outside of the Law and these two instances, ‘betulah’ does not really mean ‘virgin’? Why then is ‘betulah’ in all of the fifty times it appears in Tenakh translated as ‘virgin’ by at least half of all the translations you find at Biblehub.com, and usually by the vast majority of them? It is sometimes translated as ’young woman’, ‘maid’ or ‘maiden’, but ‘virgin’ is by far dominant.
At 10:34, Brown tries to prove his position with another passage from Tanakh, Joel 1:8
‘Lament – like a maiden in sackcloth
For the husband of her Youth!’
I have no idea what translation Brown uses here, but this is what he shows in the video. Note that ‘maiden’, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, means ‘a girl or young woman who is not married’. So, the use of ‘maiden’ here appears to be a little odd, because the maiden IS married!
He then says that you have to read an argument into the text to make the use of ‘virgin’ work: ‘Well, they’re only betrothed. They never married.’ However, if you check out BibleHub on this passage, you will see that 31 out of 38 English translations use ‘virgin’ in this passage, so the majority of the translators have no problems using ‘virgin’ over here. The ‘betulah’ in this verse is not translated as ‘maiden’ in any of the translations on BibleHub. Could it be that these translators understood the even worse tragedy when a betrothed woman, who then, still being a virgin, is considered married in those days, loses her husband before they had a chance to live together?
Then he quotes (at 10:58) a commentary of what he calls ‘one of the most famous, influential, learned, contemporary rabbis, one of the great giants on Jewish thought of this past generation’, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz:
‘The tragedy will be so terrible that Israel will have no recourse but to wail. Lament like a young womangirded with sackcloth who mourns for the husband of her youth.’
Rabbi Steinsaltz translates ‘betulah’ as ‘young woman’. Brown then states that this passage is ‘about a married woman, who is a ‘betulah’, who is clearly no longer a virgin. She’s lamenting over her husband’.
Where does it say in this passage that the woman is ‘clearly no longer a virgin’? Nowhere! And what tragedy is more terrible than a betrothed woman losing her husband before they had a chance to live together?
Then, in 10:37, Brown urges us not to believe him and Singer at face value, but to study and dig for yourself, ‘and then you will be shocked to see, in video after video, Rabbi Singer seriously misleads you’.
Well, I did.
Brown speaks highly of the translation of the Jewish Tanakh in Greek, the LXX or Septuagint, as we have seen in part 1. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXoI7k8aBEE), Brown says that Matthew quoted Greek translations, and that ‘the Jewish translation of the day (in Greek, that is ‘the’ LXX)’ translates the (Hebrew) word ‘almah’ (in Isaiah 7:14) as ‘parthenos’ (in Greek), which means ‘virgin’, it that simple!’ (The words in parentheses are mine, for clarification.) This means that, according to Brown, there is a Greek word, ‘parthenos’, that in and of itself means ‘virgin’.
Let us see how ‘betulah’ is translated into Greek (the LXX on BibleHub) in Genesis 24:16 on Bible Hub:
As I cannot read Greek, I used Google Translate. It gives a transliteration as well:
‘i dé parthénos ín kalí tí ópsei sfódra: parthénos ín, anír ouk égno aftín.’
In English:
‘And the virgin was very beautiful to look at; she was a virgin, no man had known her.’
The American Standard Version reads:
‘And the damsel (Rebecca) was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the fountain, and filled her pitcher, and came up.’
In this verse, we see that ‘parthenos’ is used twice in the LXX: for ‘damsel’ as well as ‘virgin’! Why is that? It is clear that in the ASV the use of ‘damsel’ did not refer to virginity; that’s established by the word ‘virgin’ (of course!), followed by the enhancement of her character (per Rashi). This means that ‘damsel’ did not mean ‘virgin’ here. Why then does the LXX translate the word ‘damsel’ as ‘parthenos’ here, when it does NOT mean ‘virgin’? Could it be that ‘parthenos’ does NOT always mean ‘virgin’, as Brown firmly asserts? Or was the skilled anonymous LXX translator flustered?
Let us look now to the second passage Brown showed us to prove that the woman in Joel 1:8 is not a ‘virgin’. First of all, when he says that the translation from Rabbi Steinsaltz shows us that the ‘betulah’ is a married woman, ‘who is clearly no longer a virgin’, he ignores the many, many Jewish AND Christian translations that do use ‘virgin’ here!
Second, steelmanning his position that the LXX is a reliable translation, with Jewish interpretations!, done by rabbis, we take a look at this passage in the LXX. on BibleHub:
‘Lament for me, for a bride girded with sackcloth, for her virgin husband.’
For comparison, here is the ASV:
‘Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.’
We see a shift of the word ‘virgin’ from the girl/bride to the husband. I don’t know why, but that is not a real problem. The real problem for Brown is the use of a grammatical conjugation of the word ‘parthenos’ in this verse. For if the husband is a virgin, if you can say so about a man with no sexual experience, that means that the bride in this verse is a virgin too! They have had no intercourse! That contradicts Brown’s statement that ‘betulah’ in this passage is ‘a married woman, who is a ‘betulah’, who is clearly no longer a virgin’, and that ‘betulah’ is correctly translated as a ’virgin’!
In summary, following Brown’s advice to study and dig, my conclusion is that Singer does NOT mislead me at all! On the contrary, I have to say that the arguments that Brown presents in his video are weak or incorrect. The statements of Rabbi Tovia Singer are not that ‘bizarre’ at all!
As a former fundamental Christian, I know that the use of the Hebrew words ‘betulah ’ and ‘almah’ (as in Isaiah 7:14), and their translations in the Bible, is a major subject of many debates between Orthodox Judaism and (Messianic) Christianity. Orthodox Judaism and Rabbi Tovia Singer maintain that ‘betulah’ is THE Hebrew word for ’virgin’, and ‘almah’ means ‘young woman’. Christianity and Brown, on the other hand, try to prove that ‘betulah’ does not always mean ‘virgin’ and that ‘almah’ can mean ‘virgin’ too. This is important for the Christian position on the nature of their messiah, Jesus, and the reliability of the New Testament and the Christian doctrines.
Maybe I will write a post on this subject in the future. Thanks for reading!
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Aug 1 2026
Dr. Michael Brown on Rabbi Tovia Singer’s ‘bizarre’ claims. Part 2: ‘Betula’.
Dr. Michael Brown is a Jewish believer in the Christian Messiah (Jesus). He is very active in promoting his belief among Jews with books, videos, and other means to try to get the Jews into Christianity. These people are called ‘missionaries’.
On the other side, in Orthodox Judaism, we find people who are called ‘counter-missionaries’, countering the missionary efforts who try to convert Jews to Christianity. A well-known counter-missionary is Rabbi Tovia Singer.
Needless to say, there are many videos on the internet where statements of the ‘other side’ are being discussed. I side with Orthodox Judaism.
In the next video, Dr. Michael Brown discusses statements made by Rabbi Tovia Singer.
This article is my opinion on Dr. Michael Brown’s arguments why Rabbi Tovia Singer’s claims are ‘bizarre’. It is not in defense of Rabbi Tovia Singer, he is well capable of doing that himself, should he feel the need for that.
In this series, without being disrespectful to both gentlemen, I will use ‘Brown’ and ‘Singer’ for convenience. This is part 2.
In the video, Brown accuses Singer of making what Brown calls ‘the most bizarre statements made at all’. They are:
* Singer claims that ONLY the Pentateuch was translated into Greek at the time of Jesus, and all the other books later, with even Christian influences (at 1:44 and repeated at 3:24).
* The Hebrew word ‘betulah’ always means ‘virgin’ (at 3:29 and 8:10).
In this post, I will address Brown’s rebuttal to Singer’s second statement.
Brown counters Singer with his statement (at 8:10) that the Hebrew word ‘betulah’ ONLY means ‘virgin’ in Jewish Law. Brown (at 8:32): ‘Otherwise, it needs qualification; otherwise, in and of itself, it does not mean virgin. There is no one Hebrew word which, in and of itself, without any other qualifier, explicitly means virgin.’
As a proof, Brown continues (at 8:58) by stating that ‘betulah’ in the Hebrew scriptures, more often than not, has no reference to virginity, but simply means ‘young woman’ or ‘maiden’. Then Brown continues to say that of the fifty times that ‘betulah’ occurs in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible or ‘Old’ Testament), the NJPSV, the New Jewish Publication Society Version (or NJPS) of the Tanakh, translates ‘maiden’ rather than ‘virgin’ thirty-one times, and that this NJPSV translation is the most widely used Jewish translation of our day. Brown does NOT tell you that this translation is widely used across Progressive and Conservative Judaism, the more liberal iterations of Judaism, and not by traditional Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism, including Singer, who opposes Browns positions. However, Brown continues by saying that even the ArtScroll Stone Edition, reflecting traditional Orthodox scholarship, frequently translates as ‘maiden’ as well.
It this translation a problem? ‘Maiden’ in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is described as: ‘a girl or young woman who is not married’. It is safe to consider these women in the time of the Tanakh to be virgins before marriage. Although ‘virgin’ is a clear indication of not having had any intercourse and of sexual purity, the scope of ‘maiden’ is the same! BTW, if you check out how ‘betulah’ is translated in English Bible translations on BibleHub, the overwhelming majority is ‘virgin’, followed by ‘maiden’. This weakens Brown’s statement that ‘betulah’ ‘more often than not, has no reference to virginity’!
And why would ‘betulah’ outside of the Jewish Law suddenly not mean a virgin? Is that also the case with a ‘blasphemer ’, for instance? Or with a ‘prophet’? I would suggest that the meaning of a word in the Law would certainly be the same throughout the rest of Tanakh; it is the definition that is laid down in the Law.
But as a proof for his position, Brown refers to Genesis 24:16 (ASV):
‘And the damsel (Rebecca) was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the fountain, and filled her pitcher, and came up.’
Brown argues that ‘betulah’ is indeed translated into ‘virgin’, but here, outside of Jewish Law, it does not really mean virgin. Why then would it be followed with the phrase ‘neither had any man known her’, had intercourse with her? Brown argues that this phrase serves as a qualifier to ‘virgin’, so that ‘betulah’ really means ‘virgin’ in THIS passage.
One of the tactics of Christian missionaries, including Brown, is that they often refer to Jewish literature outside of the Tanakh, such as the Talmud and Jewish commentators like Rashi, when defending their statements and doctrines when it is convenient. This even though Christians do not consider these sources authoritative. It is striking that the foremost Jewish commentator of all, Rashi, sheds more light on this passage, and that Brown does not mention Rashi’s comment on this passage now!
The comment comes from the Judaica Press Complete Tanach translation into English on https://www.chabad.org:
Rashi’s commentary:
This means that her virginity is not questioned by Rashi; it is already established by the word ‘betulah’. The added phrase, ‘and no man had been intimate with her’, raises her sexual modesty to an even higher level, as befitting a matriarch of the Jewish people! Brown will not tell you this. He is cherry-picking the Jewish literature when it supports his ideas, but ignoring them when they do not fit.
Brown’s ‘qualifier’ appears only TWO times in Tanakh, here in Genesis 24:16, and in Judges 21:12. Is Brown then really suggesting that outside of the Law and these two instances, ‘betulah’ does not really mean ‘virgin’? Why then is ‘betulah’ in all of the fifty times it appears in Tenakh translated as ‘virgin’ by at least half of all the translations you find at Biblehub.com, and usually by the vast majority of them? It is sometimes translated as ’young woman’, ‘maid’ or ‘maiden’, but ‘virgin’ is by far dominant.
At 10:34, Brown tries to prove his position with another passage from Tanakh, Joel 1:8
‘Lament – like a maiden in sackcloth
For the husband of her Youth!’
I have no idea what translation Brown uses here, but this is what he shows in the video. Note that ‘maiden’, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, means ‘a girl or young woman who is not married’. So, the use of ‘maiden’ here appears to be a little odd, because the maiden IS married!
He then says that you have to read an argument into the text to make the use of ‘virgin’ work: ‘Well, they’re only betrothed. They never married.’ However, if you check out BibleHub on this passage, you will see that 31 out of 38 English translations use ‘virgin’ in this passage, so the majority of the translators have no problems using ‘virgin’ over here. The ‘betulah’ in this verse is not translated as ‘maiden’ in any of the translations on BibleHub. Could it be that these translators understood the even worse tragedy when a betrothed woman, who then, still being a virgin, is considered married in those days, loses her husband before they had a chance to live together?
Then he quotes (at 10:58) a commentary of what he calls ‘one of the most famous, influential, learned, contemporary rabbis, one of the great giants on Jewish thought of this past generation’, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz:
‘The tragedy will be so terrible that Israel will have no recourse but to wail. Lament like a young woman girded with sackcloth who mourns for the husband of her youth.’
Rabbi Steinsaltz translates ‘betulah’ as ‘young woman’. Brown then states that this passage is ‘about a married woman, who is a ‘betulah’, who is clearly no longer a virgin. She’s lamenting over her husband’.
Where does it say in this passage that the woman is ‘clearly no longer a virgin’? Nowhere! And what tragedy is more terrible than a betrothed woman losing her husband before they had a chance to live together?
Then, in 10:37, Brown urges us not to believe him and Singer at face value, but to study and dig for yourself, ‘and then you will be shocked to see, in video after video, Rabbi Singer seriously misleads you’.
Well, I did.
Brown speaks highly of the translation of the Jewish Tanakh in Greek, the LXX or Septuagint, as we have seen in part 1. In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXoI7k8aBEE), Brown says that Matthew quoted Greek translations, and that ‘the Jewish translation of the day (in Greek, that is ‘the’ LXX)’ translates the (Hebrew) word ‘almah’ (in Isaiah 7:14) as ‘parthenos’ (in Greek), which means ‘virgin’, it that simple!’ (The words in parentheses are mine, for clarification.) This means that, according to Brown, there is a Greek word, ‘parthenos’, that in and of itself means ‘virgin’.
Let us see how ‘betulah’ is translated into Greek (the LXX on BibleHub) in Genesis 24:16 on Bible Hub:
‘ἡ δὲ παρθένος ἦν καλὴ τῇ ὄψει σφόδρα· παρθένος ἦν, ἀνὴρ οὐκ ἔγνω αὐτήν.’
As I cannot read Greek, I used Google Translate. It gives a transliteration as well:
‘i dé parthénos ín kalí tí ópsei sfódra: parthénos ín, anír ouk égno aftín.’
In English:
‘And the virgin was very beautiful to look at; she was a virgin, no man had known her.’
The American Standard Version reads:
‘And the damsel (Rebecca) was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the fountain, and filled her pitcher, and came up.’
In this verse, we see that ‘parthenos’ is used twice in the LXX: for ‘damsel’ as well as ‘virgin’! Why is that? It is clear that in the ASV the use of ‘damsel’ did not refer to virginity; that’s established by the word ‘virgin’ (of course!), followed by the enhancement of her character (per Rashi). This means that ‘damsel’ did not mean ‘virgin’ here. Why then does the LXX translate the word ‘damsel’ as ‘parthenos’ here, when it does NOT mean ‘virgin’? Could it be that ‘parthenos’ does NOT always mean ‘virgin’, as Brown firmly asserts? Or was the skilled anonymous LXX translator flustered?
Let us look now to the second passage Brown showed us to prove that the woman in Joel 1:8 is not a ‘virgin’. First of all, when he says that the translation from Rabbi Steinsaltz shows us that the ‘betulah’ is a married woman, ‘who is clearly no longer a virgin’, he ignores the many, many Jewish AND Christian translations that do use ‘virgin’ here!
Second, steelmanning his position that the LXX is a reliable translation, with Jewish interpretations!, done by rabbis, we take a look at this passage in the LXX. on BibleHub:
‘θρήνησον πρὸς μὲ ὑπὲρ νύμφην περιεζωσμένην σάκκον ἐπὶ τὸν ἄνδρα αὐτῆς τὸν παρθενικόν.’
The transliteration is:
‘thrínison prós mé ypér nýmfin periezosménin sákkon epí tón ándra aftís tón parthenikón.’
And Google translates as:
‘Lament for me, for a bride girded with sackcloth, for her virgin husband.’
For comparison, here is the ASV:
‘Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.’
We see a shift of the word ‘virgin’ from the girl/bride to the husband. I don’t know why, but that is not a real problem. The real problem for Brown is the use of a grammatical conjugation of the word ‘parthenos’ in this verse. For if the husband is a virgin, if you can say so about a man with no sexual experience, that means that the bride in this verse is a virgin too! They have had no intercourse! That contradicts Brown’s statement that ‘betulah’ in this passage is ‘a married woman, who is a ‘betulah’, who is clearly no longer a virgin’, and that ‘betulah’ is correctly translated as a ’virgin’!
In summary, following Brown’s advice to study and dig, my conclusion is that Singer does NOT mislead me at all! On the contrary, I have to say that the arguments that Brown presents in his video are weak or incorrect. The statements of Rabbi Tovia Singer are not that ‘bizarre’ at all!
As a former fundamental Christian, I know that the use of the Hebrew words ‘betulah ’ and ‘almah’ (as in Isaiah 7:14), and their translations in the Bible, is a major subject of many debates between Orthodox Judaism and (Messianic) Christianity. Orthodox Judaism and Rabbi Tovia Singer maintain that ‘betulah’ is THE Hebrew word for ’virgin’, and ‘almah’ means ‘young woman’. Christianity and Brown, on the other hand, try to prove that ‘betulah’ does not always mean ‘virgin’ and that ‘almah’ can mean ‘virgin’ too. This is important for the Christian position on the nature of their messiah, Jesus, and the reliability of the New Testament and the Christian doctrines.
Maybe I will write a post on this subject in the future. Thanks for reading!
By Tom • Judaic Polemics 0 • Tags: betulah, bizarre statements, Christianity, Dr. Michael Brown, Judaism, Michael Brown, parthenos, Rabbi Tovia Singer, Tovia Singer, virgin, Youtube