Dichroic ([info]dichroic) wrote in [info]weirdjews,
@ 2005-02-28 19:48:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
A recent comment on "Judaism with a twist of Goddess" got me thinking.

Yes I get my theology from odd places, but... in A Monstrous Regiment of Women, by Laurie R. King) who isn't Jewish but who has studied theology), the character Mary Russell says that English translations of the Old Testament there are "blatant mistranslations and deliberate obfuscations" of feminine imagery of God. She translates Deuteronomy 32:18 with parallel male and female imagery as "You have forgotten the Rock that begot have forgotten the God who writhed in the effort of giving birth to you", and mentions similar mistranslations in Job 38, Psalms 22, Isaiah 66, Hosea 11, and Isaiah 42.

Several of you here are much better Hebrew and Biblical scholars than I am. Granted Russell's claims are far less shocking in 200 than in 1918 (when the story is set), what do you think of them? I'm not much interested in whether there were deliberate mistranslations or whether scholars of the five hundred years just tended to assume male images were the right ones; I suspect the latter but I don't think you can tell at this remove. But does the original Hebrew contain more references to God's female as well as male attributes?

I do know Shekhinah, one of the Names we use, is feminine but I don't know if it really has female implications or is just grammatically feminine, not quite the same thing. Or is it?

(Post a new comment)


[info]catfish23
2005-02-28 07:25 pm UTC (link)
i'm a student, so i can only wish for time to look stuff like that up, but i just wanted to gush about adoring Laurie R. King.

!!!

(Reply to this)


[info]kahunadoctor
2005-02-28 08:26 pm UTC (link)
heresy begets heresy
my 2 cents

(Reply to this)


[info]mike72486
2005-02-28 08:35 pm UTC (link)
I don't get it. My artscroll says the same thing basically:

"tzur y'ladcha teshi vatishcach Hashem mchol'lecha."

"You ignored the rock who gave birth to you and forgot Hashem who brought you forth."

What's the revelation? To give birth is laledet and you can see the root in y'ladcha but to go is lalechet, which you can see in mchol'lecha. I don't see how she got the second half of the verse to render something about "writhing in pain in the effort of giving birth to you"

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dichroic
2005-03-01 06:55 am UTC (link)
I don't have my book with me right now, but I believe the word "writhed" does come from the original root, with the implication of giving birth. Still, your translation specifically mentions giving birth, so the implications are similar.

However, it took me about 2 seconds of Internet search to find an online Deuteronomy and the very first one renders that passage, "Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee". I don't know which translation it is. Now, the word "begat" is used pretty freely in the King James version, and IIRC is usually used for the *male* act of engendering, as in Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob, which is a very different idea than that of giving birth, which (IMO, again) implicitly ascribes female characteristics to God.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]mike72486
2005-03-01 09:41 am UTC (link)
The word "writhe" in Hebrew is hitpatel. How does that come from the root for lalechet? That doesn't really make sense.

However, it took me about 2 seconds of Internet search to find an online Deuteronomy and the very first one renders that passage, "Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee".....which is a very different idea than that of giving birth, which (IMO, again) implicitly ascribes female characteristics to God.

I don't see your point. Like I said, in Artscroll and other Chumashim the verse is rendered as referring to giving birth. Most Bible "translations" on the net come from Christian sources so in a Jewish context, I don't understand what the point of making use of their erronious translations is.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]dichroic
2005-03-01 09:53 am UTC (link)
Without even addressing the question of whether other people's translations are by definition erroneous, that was sort of the point of my original posting: to ask what the Jewish view was.

And because there is almost never one single "Jewish view", I asked for opinions here. Though even when a translation clearly uses the phrase "giving birth" it's still possible to ignore the implications in explicaiton of that verse, or there would be no need for such thing as feminist Jewish scholarship.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]mike72486
2005-03-01 10:28 am UTC (link)
What is "feminist Jewish scholarship"? Or more pointedly, what's the point?

The idea that G-d is somehow always identified as a man is nonsensical considering that when one davens/studies in Hebrew, that really doesn't come across since there's no neuter.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]dichroic
2005-03-01 06:10 pm UTC (link)
Found it: "The verb used is hul, which means to twist. Elserwhere it is used of the movement in a dance, or, as it is here, in childbirth." Not wanting to open a cans of worms without some worm food, I checked my Hebrew-English dictionary and it does list "chal" as a meaning for dance. Could mchol'lecha be from that instead of from lalechet?

Either way, judging from comments below, it's a moot point in that the Jewish translation you quote does explicitly say "giving birth"; I'd guess the mchol'lecha is also about childbirth (as opposed to "brought you forth" in the sense of "commanded you to exist", which works well with what [info]shirei_shibolim says about Biblical parallelism below.

Sorry, I'm not trying to belabor an argument; it's just that I find this sort of linguistic study fascinating.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]liosho
2005-02-28 08:48 pm UTC (link)
Well, the English translations are probably based on the Vulgate, which is based on the Septuagint, which is definitely not the same as the Hebrew original. Potential heresies aside, there's a lot of possible mistranslations floating around in the English (which groups like Jews for Jesus make use of heavily).

G-d is indeed given male and female attributes, but they are obviously anthroporphisms and are NOT to be taken literally. I'm actually in the middle of reading a discussion of that in Lisa Aiken's To Be a Jewish Woman. More discussion about G-d's attributes (but definitely not all there is out there about it) can be found in the first few chapters of Maimonides' Sefer HaMaddah (The Book of Knowledge).

Hope this helps somewhat.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dichroic
2005-03-01 09:57 am UTC (link)
Even without taking the anthropomorphisms literally, I argue that using predominantly male imagery to describe God creates the impression, conscious or un-, that men are closer to God. Or that traditionally-male attributes are stronger. Using imagery relevant to both sexes I think emphasizes the point that we all all (imperfect) images of God. Or that God transcends all that we can be, whichever you prefer.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]funkyirishjew
2005-02-28 09:55 pm UTC (link)
I can't claim to be a biblical scholar. That being said, the idea that God is male or female is laughable. God is without limits. To be male or female is to have limits ( namely, that if one is male one cannot be female and vice versa ) When ever we use terms of gender or any kind of anthromorphism for God we are speaking in an imperfect language to try and communicate an idea. When we speak of God holding, crying, speaking, etc, these are imperfect finate attempts to describe a concept for the audience that is hearing it.

-FIJ

(Reply to this)


[info]shirei_shibolim
2005-02-28 11:46 pm UTC (link)
She translates Deuteronomy 32:18 with parallel male and female imagery as "You have forgotten the Rock that begot have forgotten the God who writhed in the effort of giving birth to you", and mentions similar mistranslations in Job 38, Psalms 22, Isaiah 66, Hosea 11, and Isaiah 42.

Sounds like an agenda overriding whatever abilities she had in Hebrew. The verb leholel (לחולל) means "to do," "to perform" or "to make." Nothing about difficulties in childbirth.

(Reply to this) (Thread)
And come to think of it . . .
[info]shirei_shibolim
2005-03-01 04:28 am UTC (link)
. . . the idea doesn't really work in context. The passage is from a section (Parashat Ha'azinu) that extensively uses a device called Biblical parallelism. The gist of parallelism is that you say the same thing twice with somewhat different phrasings.

Western literary thought tells us to dissect the nuances of "Lend ear, O heavens, and I shall speak" versus "and hear, O world, the words of my mouth," which misses the point entirely. (Deut. 32:1) It's a repetition of an idea in a poetic style particular to the ancient near east.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]dichroic
2005-03-01 10:00 am UTC (link)
Certainly she has an agenda. Thisis a fictional character speaking; the author has to do what makes the story work. I don't think this would extend to falsifying the original root, but it might to making something seem revolutionary (at least to a particular group in 1918) that is commonly accepted now.

I will look up the verb she's discussing when I get home today.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]beckyzoole
2005-03-01 02:03 pm UTC (link)
First, a little background information:

The King James Bible is an English translation of the Vulgate, which is a Latin translation of the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew! As is obvious to anyone who's ever played telephone, there are many mistakes. We don't need to blame deliberate, blatant attempts at discrimination. It's just the nature of the translating process.

Christian translations tend to follow the King James, even when they are freshly made directly from the Hebrew. People tend to see and hear what they expect to see and hear, they think the meaning is what they want it to be, and so their translations reflect their biases.

In Jewish readings of the Torah, G-d is neither male nor female. G-d is both male and female, and more than that, and neither. There is some male imagery, and some female imagery used to describe G-d. But G-d cannot really be described using human terms.

So how did the Christian view of G-d become so masculine?

Hebrew has no neutral, no "it" -- every noun is either male or female, and the grammatical gender of a noun may have nothing to do with sex. (Sort of like ships being called "she" in English.) If the gender of a noun is not known, you use the masculine. That's the grammatical rule.

In the Torah, G-d is usually referred to with masculine pronouns and the masculine tense of verbs. But sometimes the feminine is used. Oddly, most translations (and all Christian ones) use only the masculine. This is mostly an artifact of translation.

Greek and Latin have neutrals, and English does too, a little (all we have is the word "it"). But when the early translators saw the Hebrew masculine tense, they translated it as masculine -- even though the neuter tense might have been more appropriate. And they figured that the feminine tenses were mistakes. (In English we use "it" only for inanimate objects, so we can't really use it for G-d.)

Your quoted translation of Deuteronomy 32:18 is a particularly bad translation. It's quite definately "the Rock that gave birth to you" in Hebrew. How odd that, while attempting to illustrate feminine imagery, she picked a mistranslation that uses the masculine imagery of "begot" instead! And that "writhed in the effort of giving birth to you" -- WTF? That's not in the Hebrew. At all. I've never read Laurie King, but this makes me doubt her scholarship, to say the least.

Whatever. There are plenty of feminine attributes of G-d in Judaism. But Judaism does not consider G-d to have a gender, so it's kind of irrelevant anyway.

(Reply to this)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…