Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Gender-Sensitive Translations of the Bible

Translations, broadly speaking, are of two types. Type A translations are committed to the source text and its idiosyncrasies; Type B translations, to the idiosyncrasies of the target language and the felt needs of a particular demographic for whom the translation is designed. I use “types” in the sense of Weberian ideal types. In practice, translations are compromises. Types A and B are relative, not absolute categories.

Andrew Compton on David Stein’s “Grammar of Social Gender”

Go here. Andrew is a careful reader, a detail person, a scholar’s scholar. For posts and comment threads on David Stein’s ground-breaking research on this blog, go here, here, here, and here, and last but not least, here. You will find the comment threads of interest, with contributions by, among others, David himself, Suzanne McCarthy, Peter Kirk, Iyov, Ari Lamm, Scott Gray, Kurk Gayle, Keith Williams, and a highly qualified anonymous commenter.

The Grammar of Social Gender in Biblical Hebrew

That’s the title of an excellent essay by David E. S. Stein. He was kind enough to provide a link to it for readers of this blog: go here. This is a version of a presentation David gave last year at SBL San Diego. The paper was published in Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 7-26.

David will be presenting further on the same topic in Boston at SBL in just a couple of weeks. The title of the relevant paper is “The (In)adequacy of “Man” as an English Equivalent of the Biblical Hebrew Noun איש (30 min).” He will present it on Tuesday morning in the Bible Translation Section (SBL 25-6) opposite the Biblical Hebrew Poetry Section (SBL 25-8) on Daughter Zion’s Ambivalent Nature, of which I am the presider. So I won’t be able to hear David’s presentation. But I am confident that he will continue to make the fruits of his research available online. An excellent practice.

Is the biblical God a persona beyond gender?

In this post, I discuss the conclusions of an article by David E. S. Stein entitled:

“On Beyond Gender: Representation of God in the Torah and in Three Recent Renditions into English,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 15 (2008) 108-137

I thank David for sending me a copy of his article. Below the fold, I answer “No” to the question posed in the title of this post. I am convinced David would answer "No" as well. Nevertheless, we differ about the degree to which the “No” must be qualified, and the implications of a qualified "No" for the work of translation and interpretation today.

Psalm 1 and the Issue of Gender-Sensitive Translation

Psalm 1 begins this way in Hebrew:

אַשְׁרֵי הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר 

O the happinesses of the ish who

As ESV suggests in a note (go here) and as David E. S. Stein has persuasively demonstrated (go here), in cases like these, the masculine singular ish ‘man’ is used generically, to refer to an individual of either gender. How then should Psalm 1 be translated? Here is my attempt:

Is the Decalogue addressed to men only? Why Polythress and Grudem are right and Plaskow and Brenner are wrong

In his “Notes: Gender-Related Changes to NJPS in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised Edition,” David Stein remarks on the irony of the fact that feminists Judith Plaskow and Athalya Brenner – superb scholars, I might note – take the masculine singular form of address in the Decalogue as excluding women, whereas anti-feminists Vern Polythress and Wayne Grudem take it as inclusive (on Exodus 20:2; online here). Stein goes on to show why Plaskow and Brenner are wrong and Polythress and Grudem are right. Details below the fold.

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.

A Gender-Sensitive Translation of the Torah

Under the editorship of David E. S. Stein, a gender-sensitive adaptation of the NJPS translation of the Torah[1] recently appeared. Entitled The Contemporary Torah, it is a thoughtful piece of work. In conjunction with the documentation Stein provides online, it will be treated as an inevitable point of departure in future discussions of gendered language used of human beings and God in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. More than anyone else before him, Stein tackles the issues faced in translating the gendered language of the Bible with sensitivity and verve.

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[1] The new Jewish Publication Society version of the Torah came out in 1962 and superseded the 1917 version. Revisions of the 1962 version were published in 1967, 1985, and 1999. For a splendid introduction to Harry Orlinsky, the general editor of NJPSV, see Iyov’s post here. Thanks to Iyov, Orlinsky’s extensive notes to his team’s translation of Genesis are available online (go here and note the index at the bottom). It is hoped that Iyov will post Orlinsky’s notes to the rest of the Torah. 

A Gender Accurate Translation of the Torah

What would that look like? I will soon review a recent volume that answers the question in spades:

The Contemporary Torah: A Gender-Sensitive Adaptation of the JPS Translation
     Edited by David E.S. Stein
     Consulting Editors: Carol L. Meyers, Adele Berlin, and Ellen Frankel
     Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2006.