Male-Gendered Language for God in the Torah: How to Handle It

According to David Stein, editor of The Contemporary Torah, all language referred to God is figurative to one degree or another. As he points out in an entry entitled “Male metaphors for God,” “The Torah expressed certain aspects of God’s being, and of Israel’s relationship with its patron deity, via [gender-specific, male] metaphors.” Nevertheless, “Such metaphors appear to point towards the roles that God plays, rather than making a statement about God’s gender” (p. 404).

When it comes to metaphors, it is dangerous to play fast and loose with gender-specific details. It is to Stein’s credit that he does not. To remain true to the Torah’s nuances, he employs gender-specific, male language wherever necessary to maintain the gist of the metaphors themselves.

When God is called “lord,” “father,” “king,” and “man of war,” the gendered nature of said terminology cannot be effaced without injuring the language’s ability to express a multifaceted concept in short compass.

For example, Stein does not alter the male-gendered metaphorical language that describes God in Exodus 15:1-4:

אָז יָשִׁיר־מֹשֶׁה וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת־הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת לַיהוָה

וַיֹּאמְרוּ לֵאמֹר

 

אָשִׁירָה לַיהוָה               כִּי־גָאֹה גָּאָה

סוּס וְרֹכְבוֹ                    רָמָה בַיָּם

 

עָזִּי וְזִמְרָת יָהּ                וַיְהִי־לִי לִישׁוּעָה

זֶה אֵלִי וְאַנְוֵהוּ               אֱלֹהֵי אָבִי וַאֲרֹמְמֶנְהוּ

יְהוָה אִישׁ מִלְחָמָה         יְהוָה שְׁמוֹ

 

מַרְכְּבֹת פַּרְעֹה וְחֵילוֹ       יָרָה בַיָּם

וּמִבְחַר שָׁלִשָׁיו               טֻבְּעוּ בְיַם־סוּף

Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to יהוה.

They said:

I will sing to יהוה, for He has triumphed gloriously;

Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea.

יהוה is my strength and might;

He is become my deliverance.

This is my God and I will enshrine Him;

The God of my ancestors, and I will exalt Him.

יהוה, the Warrior –

יהוה is His name!

Pharoah’s chariots and his army

He has cast into the sea:

And the pick of his officers

Are drowned in the Sea of Reeds.

 The Hebrew expression בני ישראל, translated ‘the Israelites’ above, is an example of a male-gendered expression which often has, as here, a gender-inclusive sense. The idiom is strictly referential, with no perceptible metaphorical freight, and is thus to be translated, in contemporary English, with gender-neutral terminology, as NJPSV (1962) already did: ‘the Israelites.’ JPSV (1917) also rendered in gender-inclusive terms, with ‘the children of Israel.’ But ‘children of’ Israel is a falsely literal translation. All that בני ישראל implies here is ‘members of a class Israel’ the nation, not Israel the patriarch (cf. Exodus 14:30). In other contexts, the same phrase refers to the actual 12 sons of Israel=Jacob the patriarch (Exodus 1:1) or to Jacob’s descendants more generally (Genesis 46:8). It cannot be overemphasized that the precise meaning of an expression is determined by context.

But it would be a mistake to render the language applied to God in this passage in gender-neutral terms. As Stein points out:

The poetic figure in vv. 1-4 takes ancient Near Eastern gender roles as a given: the (male) role of expert warrior represented salvation from military threats.

I promised in my first post in this series that I would offer constructive comments on a range of matters regarding NJPSV, insofar as Stein preserves it, and insofar as he does not. Here goes.

First of all, The Contemporary Torah does well, I think, to read יהוה where MT does so. As the editors remark: “We invite those who read this translation aloud to pronounce the Name via whatever term that they customarily use for it” (xxvii). I fervently hope Christian translations of the Old Testament adopt this practice. However, I see no reason why יה in Exodus 15:2 should be reproduced as יהוה. Why not put “Yah,” or if that is understood to violate a halachic rule, why not put יה?

Secondly, the choice to continue with 1962 NPSV’s template of capitalized “He” and cognates is unfortunate. It makes it seem as if the text is referring to the archetypal “He” of the universe. But that is not the case. As Stein rightly remarks, “Deliverance is what the text context emphasizes, not divine maleness” (p. 405).

Exodus 15:1-4 in Hebrew lacks independent pronouns altogether. Capitalized “He” four times in this passage, along with capitalized “Him” twice and “His” once, gives a misleading impression.

Thirdly, NJPSV does a poor job of reflecting the poetic structure of the passage. Without any obvious rhyme or reason, NJPSV sometimes divides the text into short half-lines, and sometimes does not. The poetic organization of the text into half-lines of two to three prosodic words, lines consisting of two half-lines, and strophes consisting of two to three lines, is, I think, reasonably straightforward.

A further adaptation of NJPSV, attentive to both gender accuracy and poetic structure, might look like this:

Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to יהוה.

They said:

 

I will sing to יהוה,

           the one who triumphed gloriously;

horse and driver

           he hurled into the sea.

 

יהוה is my strength and might,

           to whom I owe my deliverance;

this is my God, whom I will enshrine,

           the God of my ancestors, whom I exalt;

יהוה, the Warrior –

         יהוה is his name!

 

Pharoah’s chariots and his army,

         he cast into the sea;

the pick of his officers,

        drowned in the Sea of Reeds.

Comments

[Suzanne]

So this translation does make Israelites (sons of Israel) and ancestors (fathers) gender inclusive since the referents are both male and female. I would certainly take for granted that metaphorical gender should be kept. This seems fairly straightforward to me.

However, calling Hilary Clinton "man of the year" is not possible in my dialect of English. Sorry, there seems to be a bit of gobbledygook going on here. But we're all guilty of a little nonsense now and then.

[David E. S. Stein]

Well done, John! I am delighted to have an opportunity to respond to your critique.

1. Regarding rendering as "Yah" in Exod. 15:2, I have no objection. I didn't do so in CJPS (=The Contemporary Torah) because it was outside the terms of my permission to adapt our base translation, NJPS; I was restricted to tinkering with gender-related issues only. NJPS had "the LORD" in 15:2 (and also in 17:16, where "Yah" appears again in the Hebrew), and I didn't have warrant to change that.

2. Regarding the alleged overemphasis on maleness in the CJPS rendering of Exodus 15:1-4, I am sympathetic to your point and to the thrust of your proposed solution. My drafts actually went back and forth on this issue in that spot. In the end, we took the course that we did for two reasons. Because this passage is one of only two in the entire Torah for which we used male pronouns for God, readers might think that the male language was a mistake unless it received some emphasis. More importantly, the heavily male rendering seemed warranted by the context of situation in this passage, rather than by the language itself. Emphasis on maleness in translation would convey the extent to which the ancient audience perceived making war as a quintessentially male activity, which might otherwise be lost on contemporary readers.

3. Regarding your critique of the JPS poetic structure, I admire your sensitivity to Hebrew prosody. Again, modifying NJPS in that regard was outside the purview of my assignment in creating the CJPS adaptation.

By the way, at the SBL Annual Meeting last month, Judah Kraut presented in passing a cogent argument that Exod. 15:3 is an instance of "staircase parallelism," thus having the meaning (in my words, not his) "YHWH: he manifests as a crack warrior!"

Finally, let me note that I devote about 9000 words to systematlcally addressing the question of how to handle male-gendered language for God (the topic of your post) in a forthcoming article, "On Beyond Gender: The Representation of God in the Torah and in Three Recent English Renditions," that will appear in the Spring 2008 issue of _Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues_. As a condition of publication I am not allowed to post the article on my Web site, so it won't appear there.

[JohnFH]

Suzanne,

I chose the example of "man of the year" on purpose. It allows me to ask the following question: given that my ideolect allows it - or at least, the ideolect of my dreams - but yours does not, should I use the expression?

The answer, I think, is obvious: I can do what I want on my own time, but in Bible translation for someone other than myself, language has to reflect the actual usage of my target audience, not in-my-dreams usage.

Regretfully, "Person of the Year" it is.

[JohnFH]

David,

thanks for stopping by.

I hadn't occurred to me that your thorough recasting of the language of the Torah elsewhere, such that masculine pronouns in reference to God were eliminated, might have made it imperative to retain them in Exodus 15:1-4.

Personally, I'm not in favor of such a thorough recasting, but that's easy for me to say, since in the cultural context I work in, it comes naturally to most to speak of God in relatively non-signifying masculine terms. At the same time, most people seem to be aware that God is beyond male and female, or embraces both.

[Peter Kirk]

I must say I am a little puzzled here. What is intrinsically male about the role of a warrior, even at that distant period? One of the few other poems we have from this early period in Israelite history is about a female warrior, Deborah; although the accompanying prose makes it clear that the actual fighting was done by Barak, in the poem Deborah has the more prominent role, along with another woman, Jael. Moreover, the Hebrew text of Exodus 15 is entirely gender generic, apart from the merely conventional masculine gender agreement with the name YHWH. So, what is the justification for introducing masculinity into the text at this point, if nowhere else?

[JohnFH]

Peter, part of it is the expression 'man of war' in Exodus 15:3. That is gender-specific.

But I also think you are onto something with your reference to Deborah and Jael. On the one hand, being a warrior and hunting have contributed since forever to male gender construction. That makes females who are warriors or hunters particularly interesting, w/o erasing thereby the viability of the warrior and hunting roles to function as aids to male self-understanding.

[Peter Kirk]

Thanks, John. I had missed this 'ish/ But this word is only sometimes gender specific, and I'm sure it is not used here to say that YHWH is a man rather than a woman of war. And since it clearly doesn't here imply "human" either, I really don't think it can mean more than "one characterised by", just as ben often means in Hebrew.

Well, if hunters are paradigmatically male, we need to think about Diana (the goddess) as well as Deborah. OK, a different culture, but it shows that in ancient times hunters were not always male.

[David E. S. Stein]

The following, which is an endnote lifted from my forthcoming article on God-language in English translation, may shed light on issues raised recently in the Comments here:

That some other ancient Near Eastern cultures recognized a warrior goddess does not mean that making war was a woman’s role. On the contrary, warmaking was quintessentially male, part of the very delineation of genders: both literary sources and grave goods (items buried alongside human remains) consistently associate weaponry with men as opposed to women. Those occasional females who did bear arms were considered not-truly-women; likewise, battle goddesses were not imagined as true women. Given such mores, I concluded that in the eyes of the ancient audience, the ascription of God as warrior [e.g., in Exod. 15:3] was a masculine image.

See, e.g., Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., “Symbols for Masculinity and Femininity: Their Use in Ancient Near Eastern Sympathetic Magic Rituals,” _Journal of Biblical Literature_, 85 (1966), pp. 326–334; Kathleen McCaffrey, “Reconsidering Gender Ambiguity in Mesopotamia: Is a Beard Just a Beard?” in S. Parpola and R.M. Whiting (eds.), _Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale_, Helsinki, July 2–6, 2001 (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002), p. 383; and Amélie Kuhrt, “Women and War,” _NIN: Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity_, 2/1 (2001), pp. 1–25.

[JohnFH]

Thanks, David, for the lucid comment.

I would also point the interested reader to Cynthia R. Chapman's excellent monograph entitled, The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter (HSS 62; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2004).