>>13415718>>13415727As stated by another anon:
>>337770717You can find some lexicons that define na'arah ambiguously as "female of marriagable age", but that's misleading as it does typically refer to children.
Strong's Hebrew Concordance
>H5291. na'arah>Feminine of H5288; a girl from infancy to adolescencehttps://studybible.info/strongs/H5291>the na’arah, who is no older than twelve years and a dayhttps://books.google.com/books?id=UKqFE_2ZzHsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA11#v=onepage-Childhood and Children in Early Christianity
The na'ar (masculine base form) has many examples:
Three-month-old baby Moses is called a na'ar (masculine). "she saw the child (yeled), and behold, it was a crying na'ar" (Exodus 2:6).
Samuel's mother calls her child a na'ar both as a suckling (1 Sam 1:22) and as a growing boy (vv. 24,25,27). The sons of Jesse are n'arim (plural, 16:11); they still live with their father but are old enough to share a sacrificial meal (v. 5).
etc., etc.
>Girls could in fact already be given marriage long before actual physical maturity, perhaps even as young as five years old (cf. Leviticus 27:5), and it did happen that marriages were already consummated with prepubescent girls.Botterweck and Ringgren, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Vol. 8, 1997, pp. 144-145:
https://books.google.com/books?id=6kjpsU4Lhg8C&lpg=PA145&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q&f=false> consummated with prepubescent girlsIt's significant the neither Moses nor the prophets ever condemned this. God had a lot to say about murder and idolatry, but not a single thing against MAPs.
