I took the course The Bible and the Literary Imagination in the fall semester of my senior year at Barnard. For an English major drawn to the mysteries of how God moves in the world — and perhaps, too, to the stories of kings, queens, and prophets — the prospect of exploring this vast collection of texts that had been composed over the span of thousands of years, in multiple genres, geographical regions, and societies, felt exciting.
The Bible’s scope and influence was astounding to me. There was way more material than we could ever hope to cover in one semester. As novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote in a 2011 New York Times article, “The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.”
Along with the uplifting teachings (that we are all created in God’s image, required to treat others with dignity, and expected to be responsible stewards of the Earth), there are other puzzling and profoundly disturbing messages. No wonder these ancient writings have been used over the centuries to elevate us morally as well as to justify the worst of human behavior. Challenges abound for those brave readers who choose to grapple with this text. I was hooked.
Fast-forward 20 years. I built a career as a book editor, then paired it with study for the rabbinate. As a rabbi, I interpret the verse from Proverbs 3:18, “[Wisdom] is a Tree of Life to those who hold on to it,” to mean that studying the Bible is a path by which we can both embrace and wrestle with tradition. I teach that doing so is central to every generation.
One of my most enduring challenges is the exclusively male designations for the God of Israel used by almost every major English-language translation of the Hebrew Bible: the Lord God of history, He who took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, He whose presence fills the Earth, and so forth.
According to classical as well as modern Jewish religious thought and scholarship, God’s gender has never been male. But this knowledge has been obscured by the conventions of English language usage and patriarchal frameworks of seeing the world. Fortunately, as society changes, so does language. At this moment, lexicographers, linguists, and literary scholars by and large agree that the male is a false generic. “He” is no longer acceptable in formal writing as a generic pronoun, and “mankind” is no longer acceptable as a universal noun. In English, which contains gender-neutral pronouns, there is no way to justify this method of translating our texts anymore.
I recently served as literary editor and a revising translator of an adapted English-language translation of the Hebrew Bible, a translation whose stated mission was to modernize the text for the next generation. One of the most delightful aspects of this project (for me) was rendering the God language gender neutral.
While this renewing of the text doesn’t eliminate some of its difficulties, at least readers of this edition will no longer have to nfilter Divine wisdom through an exclusively male lens. Now, if we choose to listen, we can hear “a voice of slender silence” as poet and liturgist Marcia Falk renders I Kings 19:12 — allowing for a more nuanced awareness of Divine presence.
Will it change centuries of problematic texts and human behavior? No, but embracing the Bible with a fresh perspective offers us the hope of building a more equitable future.
Rabbi Beth Lieberman ’84 is the founder of Textish. She served as literary editor and a revising translator of the JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition (JPS/Sefaria, 2023).
