From the About comes this great question: I have a question about the gender of nations. It seems like nations can be referred with both masculine and feminine pronouns. Is there any significance with this change? For example, Moab is “he” in Isa 16:12, Israel is “he” in Jer 2:14; 50:17 but “herself” in Jer…
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If we’re not careful, our Bible translations will wrongly alienate 51% of the English-speaking population, and perhaps offend even more. The issue (which has been addressed frequently — recently by me here and here, by Clayboy, Bill Mounce, and many others) is whether (orwhen) the English word “men” includes both men and women. In my…
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Clayboy has a short post in which he describes an experiment he ran. He told an audience, “I like to ask my fellow men to stand.” Only the men stood. This is pretty convincing evidence that, at least where he was, “men” doesn’t mean “men and women.” I wonder if there is any context in…
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Joel Berkowitz (in Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage) writes of the hubris of Yiddish theaters that promoted Yiddish productions of Shakespeare that were “translated and improved.”* Though we mock it now, I often think I see the same thing in Bible translations, in two related ways: 1. “Translators” want to make the general flavor…
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Frequently a Hebrew or Greek word will, in the eyes of English speakers, “mean more than one thing.” There are two ways for this to happen. The first is when there are really two foreign words, similar to the situation with “bank” in English (both a financial institution and the side of a river); that’s…
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In a comment on A. Admin’s post about Bill Mounce, Mark Baker-Wright takes Dr. Mounce to task for writing (originally here): Have you noticed the new advertisement for the Prius: “Harmony Between Man, Nature And Machine.” I’ll bet Toyota would be glad to sell to women. Dr. Mounce is using the point to support his…
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Gender, and in particular the gender implications of anthropos, have come up over and again recently (for example, my posts here and here, some great information from Suzanne here, and a response by Peter here). I hope to have time in a few days to prepare a fuller post with a little more background and…
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Still with the goal of providing a solid framework for understanding gender and translation, here’s another example from Modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew has two ways of expressing the generic “you” of English (as in, “you shouldn’t put your elbows on the dinner table,” which means “one shouldn’t….”). The first is a plural masculine verb with…
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Thanks to A.Admin on Aberration blog for pointing out the recently posted FAQ about the revisions to the (T)NIV. Gender Of the 31 questions in the FAQ, 7 are specifically about gender, and another few are about “flashpoints” (their word and their scare quotes) — presumably gender and the word sarx — in the translation.…
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A comment to Peter Kirk’s discussion of Matthew 12:9-14 drew my attention to a passage from Appendix D of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad. In it, Twain writes about his experience with German, and, among things, gender. Here’s part of what Twain writes: See how [this crazy thing called gender] looks in print — I…
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