Deuteronomy 22:15

“Then shall the father and the mother of the damsel take, etc.] Power from the court, according to the Targum of Jonathan; having leave and licence granted them to do what follows, these were to, and would, concern themselves in such an affair, partly for the credit and reputation of their child, and partly for their own honour, who were in danger, as Jarchi observes, of coming into contempt for their ill education of her: and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity; the sheet she lay in when she first bedded with her husband, in her parents’ possession, and kept by them as a witness of her purity, should there ever be any occasion for it: and which were to be brought unto the elders…”

“22:15 proof of her virginity: A blood-stained cloth would indicate that the woman’s hymen was ruptured by her first act of intercourse with her husband.”

“In such a case the parents of the young woman (הנּער for הנּערה, as in Gen 24:14, Gen 24:28, according to the earliest usage of the books of Moses, a virgin, then also a young woman, e.g., Rut 2:6; Rut 4:12) were to bring the matter before the elders of the town into the gate (the judicial forum; see Deu 21:19), and establish the chastity and innocence of their daughter by spreading the bed-clothes before them. It was not necessary to this end that the parents should have taken possession of the spotted bed-clothes directly after the marriage night, as in customarily done by the Bedouins and the lower classes of the Moslem in Egypt and Syria (cf. Niebuhr, Beschr. v. Arab. pp. 35ff.; Arvieux,…”