Readers keeping up with the theoretical issues surrounding gender and translation may find this helpful or interesting or both. It’s reposted from my The Glamour of the Grammar column for the Jerusalem Post: Unlike in English, Hebrew nouns, verbs, and adjectives come in two varieties, commonly called masculine and feminine. The endings -a (singular) and…
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I’ll admit. I had an agenda when I composed my last post. And the agenda is this: The Greek pateres is one of the words that has more than one correct translation into English. Among the reasonable possibilities are “fathers,” “parents,” and “ancestors.” For example, in Ephesians 6:4 (and Colossians 3:21) it is clearly male…
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It’s hardly surprising that ancient words don’t match up perfectly with modern English ones. To pick one example out of thousands, the Hebrew kol is variously “sound” or “voice” (and the Greek translation fone is even broader, including “word” and somtimes “language”). In Genesis 27:22, Isaac hears Jacob’s kol; and in Psalm 47:5, we read…
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Comments like, “Even if you remove the male pronouns, is the Bible not still a patriarchal text?” (from a comment on Rumblings) and observations such as those from Mark Stevens that the T-NIV has been “unfarily criticized” for its gender neutrality make it clear to me that people are using “gender inclusivity” and “gender neutrality”…
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