Gender and the Bible

 

     The word “wife” appears nowhere in the text of the Bible.  Neither does the word “husband.”

     You may disagree, and that’s understandable.  Our English translations of the scriptures are filled with occurrences of the words “wife” and “husband.”  You can’t get past Genesis chapter 2 without every major English translation referring to Adam and his “wife,” a term applied to her even before she receives the formal name “Eve.”  The English of Genesis chapter 3 follows up by introducing the word “husband.”

     What our translations conceal, however, is that there is no Hebrew word for “wife.”  Neither is there one for “husband.”  Hebrew has a single word, ishshah and its various forms, which simply means “woman” but in English passages is sometimes presented as “wife.”  The same is done with ish, a Hebrew word for “man” that is often rendered “husband” in Bible texts.

     For those who are already a step ahead of me, the same is true for the Greek New Testament.  Gyné is translated sometimes as “woman,” sometimes as “wife,” and andrós pops up as both man and husband, depending on which way the translation team decided to go.

     More news: When you read “the brothers” in Scripture, it may include sisters.

     When you read “the sons,” it may mean sons and daughters.

     And sometimes, when you read the word “man,” there’s actually no word at all, male or female, in the original text.

     What gives?

 

INCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     Let me state upfront that I’m not a fan of gender-inclusive versions of the Bible that artificially impose gender-neutral pronouns on my God or my fellow humans.  I see it as destruction of the original text.

     My position on that isn’t theological.  It’s linguistic and literary.  I’m just as put off by modern printings of Huckleberry Finn that omit the N-word from the very name of one of its main characters … an ironic adaptation in what’s arguably the most anti-racist book of its era.  The text of the Bible assigns God a male identity throughout, just as it assigns God female attributes in other places (see Isaiah 49:15 for God breastfeeding; Psalm 22:9-10 for God being a midwife; Deuteronomy 32:11 & 18 for God being a protective mother and giving birth; and Hosea 11:3-4 for God fulfilling a whole host of child-raising Mom roles).

     I’m grown up enough to know that God has no chromosomes, X or Y.  God has no genitalia, male or female.  God is spirit (John 4:24), and I don’t want the original versions of scripture neutered to adapt to anyone’s cultural agenda.  I want to know what it says, literally.  I’ll do my theology on the other side of my text analysis.

     That said … it isn’t just liberal-leaning translators of Scripture I take issue with.

 

EXCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     New Testament Greek has two distinct words we translate as “man” – andrós, mentioned above, which specifically means “a male human,” and anthrópos, “a human being.”  There’s a tradition among translators to render both as “man,” but anthrópos has a limited male slant to it.  Indeed, it can be used in the singular to refer to a single male, as it is in Matthew 19:5 & 10 and 1 Cor. 7:1.  However, the Greek writers Isocrates, Aristotle, and Antiphon all occasionally used it in reference to groups of women, as did the Septuagint (the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures used by Jesus and the Apostles) in Numbers 13:35.  So, anthrópos isn’t strictly gender-neutral, but it also doesn’t have a purely masculine meaning.  Anthrópos is flexible, and is usually best translated as “people” or “humans.”

     One interesting note: In Greek Scripture, the term “the Son of Man” is always written with a form of anthrópos.  Jesus is the Son of Humanity, a satisfying moniker for one born of a virgin with minmal male involvement.

     Back to English.  Sometimes when you’re reading “man” or “men” in Scripture, it’s referring to males.  Other times, it’s referring to people in general.  How are you supposed to know the difference if you don’t read ancient Greek?

     [From this point on, I’ll limit myself to commenting on the Greek parts of Scripture.  Kione Greek I can juggle, thanks to formal training; I’ve had no academic education in ancient Hebrew, so I’m no better with that than any other amateur flipping through a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.)

     One answer to solving the translation hurdle without taking five years of ancient Greek classes is to read multiple translations of the same passages. 

 

Matthew 6:14

• “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you.” KJV
• “For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” NASB 1977
• “For if you forgive people their wrongdoing, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well.” Holman
• “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” New Living Translation
• “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”  English Standard Version.

 

     Comparing these, I not only learn to appreciate the fuller meaning of the word “trespasses,” but I also get a sweeping view of how translators have dealt with the word for “men” in this passage.  Men, people, those who, and others make it clear to me that there’s a troublesome, gender-flexible word in there – and, in fact, it’s one we’ve already seen, anthrópois.  Therefore, I don’t get my heavenly Father’s forgiveness just by pardoning my husband, his brothers, and his male friends.  I have to forgive everybody.

      Reading multiple versions is a lot of work, I’ll admit.  As a people who hold the Scriptures as the very source of our faith, however, it strikes me that checking a few might be a worthy pursuit.  Besides, we live in an age where any number of Web sites do the work for us by assembling the versions.

     Still, I just annoyed some people.  Progressives who insist on inclusion in all cases are irritated at the first two examples I gave, the 1611 King James and the 1977 New American Standard Bible.  Both of those target the gender in the verse as male, a mortal sin in the progressive realm.  On the flipside, there are those of a more conservative bent who are furious that anyone would need to see the word "men" changed in early translations; shouldn’t we stop kowtowing to the feminists out there who are spoiling everything?

     Both sides have a political agenda.  Neither side sways me much.  My bias is a linguist’s bias: I’d like to see translations that are inclusive when the original language is inclusive, gendered when the original language is gendered, and vague when the original is vague about what sex is being addressed.

 

NOT AS EASY AS I THINK, THOUGH

     Let’s start with the easy stuff.

     As I mentioned above, Greek has no terms for the English words “husband” and “wife.” When you see those words in your Bible, you’re definitely seeing translations of the Greek words “male” (andrós) and “female (gyné).”  The way Bible translators know to render those words as the English terms "husband" and "wife" is context.  Most often, that context is what’s called the genitive case of a declined noun – or, for those not schooled in grammar, the “of” form of a word.  Greek has no word for “of,” so it builds that meaning into the end of a noun, adjusting “man” to mean “the man [of her],” which is to say, “her man,” her husband.  “The woman [of him]” becomes “wife.”

     But sometimes a translation runs into issues beyond the simple words.  We have cultural biases built into our way of thinking, and that affects our ways of reading (and our translators’ ways of translating).  Thus, there’s a built-in conservative assumption about verses like 1 Timothy 5:8: That it’s about a father’s requirement to be the breadwinner for his family.  Let’s read it in the English Standard Version, a version whose translators claim is gender-neutral when such language will "render literally what is in the original":

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

     Here’s our issue with the literalism-claiming ESV: Despite there being three decidedly male pronouns in that translation – his, his, and he – the Greek text written by Paul doesn’t have a single gendered pronoun in it.  All the verbs refer back to the Greek tis, the word “anyone,” an indefinite pronoun.    The Timothy sentence refers, literally in the text, to anyone’s household.  We recall that “households” in the New Testament sometimes belonged to women (Acts 16:14; 1 Cor. 1:11).  Frankly, though, I’m not the one willing to tell conservative preachers that the Bible isn’t talking here about dads being breadwinners.  I’ll leave that to braver souls.

 

THE BRETHREN AND, UM, SISTREN?

     The Greek word adelphoí is the plural of the word “brother.”  It seems it would be an easy translation.  One is a brother, more than one are a bunch of male brothers.

     But it’s language, so you know there’s a twist.  Let me tell you about my family.

     When my mother informed me that mis tíos were coming over for dinner, I at no point thought that all my uncles were the ones on their way to my house.  Tíos meant my aunt and uncle.  Yes, it’s a masculine word, and yes, it could have meant only my male uncles, but the context made it pretty clear I was seeing my Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto.  One Spanish word became three English words, tíos turning into "aunt and uncle" when migrated across the language border.

     The same held true for my mother’s hijos. We were her son and daughter, not two sons.

     The count got higher with my abuelos, my two grandmothers and two grandfathers.

     Make a masculine human into a plural form in Spanish, in French, in numerous Romance languages that evolved from Latin, and you often have a mixed group of males and females.  Or maybe all males (remember, context counts).  And it turns out non-Latin languages like ancient Greek have the same bundling property for plural males.

     So, should the word adelphoí be translated as “brothers and sisters” in most New Testament occurrences?  Some argue that doing so is ridiculous, since Greek already has the word adelphé, which means sister.  If sister isn’t in the text, why put it in?

     Remember the bundling, though.  I’d actually be misinforming you if I translated my arriving tíos as “my uncles.”  I have to add words by saying “my aunt and uncle.”  An accurate translation will sometimes have to add words.  For example, the first verse of the Gospel of Matthew has 16 words in the King James Version.  This is translated from 8 original Greek words.  Adding to the word count is not adding to the word of God – here, the KJV translation is 100% accurate.

     So, to my mind, translating adelphoí as “brothers and sisters” isn’t just allowable, it’s often the responsible thing to do … when the context allows.  I repeat: when the context allows.  One example: In Acts 16, when Paul and Silas address the "brothers" in the church meeting at the house of the merchantwoman Lydia, the term probably includes women since, you know, Lydia is standing right there being addressed in her own church.  But is that situation in Scripture common?

     Commentator Michael D. Marlowe sees these occurrences as exceptions to the majority of times the term “brethren” is used in Scripture.  However, the minister Dr. Jerry Jones gives example after example after example of Scriptures that prove Marlowe’s opinion just can’t be correct, providing citations where women are clearly mixed in with groups referred to as adelphoí.  I’ll conclude this name dropping with a reference to the opinions of the co-pastors called the Bayly brothers, who seem to argue that “brothers and sisters” should never be used in Bible translations because we all already know that “brothers” means “brothers and sisters,” just like it did in Greek.  We all just know it.

     That makes as much sense to me as my pointing at Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto while saying, “Have you met my uncles?”

 

THE VISIBLE MAN IN INVISIBLE GREEK

     I thought I’d end these reflections with a tip for those who use Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, a book that’s truly a blessing for those who wish to study scripture.  If you don’t own one, they’re pretty reasonably priced at the link above, although you’ll want to buy a magnifying glass at the same time for its tiny print.  (I don’t get a kickback from that link, FYI.  I include it because my studies as a young Christian were immensely enriched by both Strong’s and the text Gospel Parallels, a book chronologically laying out the synoptic gospels side-by-side on the same pages for instant story comparisons.)

     But book purchases weren’t my tip.  If you have Strong’s, you know that it’s laid out word-by-word, capturing every term in the Authorized and Revised English versions of the Bible.  To the right of the verses that use each word is a number referencing either the Hebrew or the Greek dictionary term the original Bible texts use.

     Should you have one, open it to the entry for MAN.  Scan the numbers to the right.  And now, start noticing the blank spaces, the times “man” is used in English without any word correlating with it in Hebrew or Greek.  Each of those is a judgment call on the part of the translator, a decision to insert the word “man” when it doesn’t appear in the original text.  Sometimes that works well, as when 1 Cor. 7:2 advises each [man] to have his own wife.  The context makes it pretty clear that “man” works better there than other options like “squid” or “microwave oven.”

     But some of those blanks, some of the insertions of “man” into the text where no man had gone before, reveal a clear gender bias in the translators.  And sometimes, that inclusion makes the text pointedly exclusionary:

“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” ~ Matthew 16:24, KJV

     Any man.  Let him.  Himself.  His cross.  And yet the Greek has no “man” in it, not in the nouns or the pronouns.  It’s another case of the indeterminate pronoun tis, meaning “anyone” or “whoever.”

     As a woman, I can’t help but feel that I’ve been robbed of the true spirit of that verse by some long-dead translator.  I’m not "any man," as the KJV requires, but I am an "anyone," whom the Lord Himself invited.  And I confess it makes me soften to those who would like to have some inclusivity in the translation.  I can handle that, as long as it’s in service to the original text.

     Yes, yes, I can hear the Bayly brothers protesting, “’Man’ means men and women, we all know that!  We don’t have to add a ‘whoever’ to this verse!  Everybody knows it mean everybody.’”

     To which I offer one reply:

     “Have you met my uncles?”

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx, aka YoYo Rez.