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Most good Bible teachers have a secret satchel of especially enticing insights that liven up a class and engage students. We want to present one of these little gems in Insight in each issue of BR. We hope this new department will surprise, teach and entertain—and thereby compel your interest. We invite submissions, from scholars and lay readers alike.
In at least one instance in the Hebrew Bible, God is referred to as feminine.
This is not apparent in English translations because “you” is neither masculine nor feminine. However, many other languages, including Hebrew, use masculine and feminine forms of “you.”
The feminine reference to God occurs in Numbers 11:15. The children of Israel are in the desert. Despite their rescue from Egyptian bondage, they are complaining bitterly. In Egypt, they recall, they ate fish and cucumbers. They had melons and onions and garlic and leeks. Here they have only manna. Moses himself is distressed at the burden of having to lead the people: “I cannot carry all this people by myself,” he tells the Lord. “It is too much for me.”
Then he asks God to kill him so that he can end his wretchedness. Here is the crucial passage:
“If this is the way you [feminine!] are going to treat me, put me to death at once.”
At that point, God tells Moses to appoint 70 elders, who would eventually share the burden of administration with him.
Is Moses calling on the Lord’s feminine nature by addressing him with the feminine “you”? This certainly seems to be a possibility.
There are some who will argue that the “you” in this verse is not really feminine. Masculine “you” in Hebrew is atah and consists of the three letters aleph, tov and heh (’T|H). Feminine “you” omits the last letter and is pronounced at.
If this were all, it would be clear that God is addressed in the feminine here. But like it or not, things get more complicated. Hebrew generally is written only with consonants. At an early stage, certain letters served as rudimentary vowels. These are called matres lectiones, “mothers of reading.” These matres, for short, are vov (pronounced long o), yod (pronounced long e) and heh. With the development of matres, words could be spelled either with them or without them. The spellings that include them are called plene orthography (full spelling). The spellings that don’t are called defective orthography.
The lack of a heh in the “you” in Numbers 11:15 may therefore be either masculine in defective orthography or feminine in plene orthography. Which is it?
In the tenth century, Jewish scribes transcribing the Hebrew Bible developed a system of “pointing,” adding subscripts and superscripts to letters to indicate vowels, thereby removing much of the ambiguity concerning how a word was to be pronounced (and understood). A different subscript would be placed under “you” when spelled aleph and tov to indicate whether it would be pronounced atah (masculine) or at (feminine).
Actually, the word spelled aleph and tov appears frequently in the Hebrew Bible, and in each case the scribes who developed the textus receptus and added the pointings had to decide whether these two letters should be pronounced atah (as if the heh were there) or simply at. In most cases the choice was easy.
In Numbers 11:15, it was not so easy. They chose at, the feminine form!
In one conservative commentary, the editor states in a note to this verse: “The female [aleph and tov] seems to refer to God.”1
It can perhaps be argued that this unusual instance is simply an orthographic variation—or in plain language, a spelling mistake. Yet we know that every word, every letter was sacred to the ancient scribes. If this aleph and tov is masculine, we would have to assume that a double mistake occurred. First, we must suppose that the ancient scribe who created the text and who wrote “you” with a final heh scores of times made a mistake by omitting the heh here. Second, we must suppose that the tenth-century scribes who pointed the word made a mistake by putting the wrong subscript under the second letter of this defectively spelled “you.”
Finally, in two instances in the Dead Sea Scrolls, God is addressed by the feminine at, once in the Damascus Document (4Q266,fr.11, l.8)2 and once in the Thanksgiving Psalms Scroll (Hodayot 13:32).3 By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, defective spelling was less common. In these two instances, did the Dead Sea Scroll scribe make a spelling error, or was he trying to tell us something about the nature of God? More work needs to be done.
Most good Bible teachers have a secret satchel of especially enticing insights that liven up a class and engage students. We want to present one of these little gems in Insight in each issue of BR. We hope this new department will surprise, teach and entertain—and thereby compel your interest. We invite submissions, from scholars and lay readers alike. In at least one instance in the Hebrew Bible, God is referred to as feminine. This is not apparent in English translations because “you” is neither masculine nor feminine. However, many other languages, including Hebrew, use masculine and feminine forms […]
