Letters to the Editor
Readers of Prof. Martin Lockshin’s recent review of THE JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition may be pleased to know that many answers to his puzzlement about particular renderings are readily available. The online essay “Notes on Gender in Translation,” cited in the preface, addresses many of the professor’s concerns. That essay, in turn, refers readers to my growing online analysis behind specific renderings, including examples discussed in the review, such as Genesis 19:31, Exodus 21:7, and Leviticus 10:14 (on the priest’s wife, and separately on the offspring’s gender).
On the question posed by the review’s title—as to whether a gender-sensitive translation has value—Prof. Lockshin implicitly appears to answer yes. If NJPS has deservedly been the authoritative English translation that he grants it to be, and if the English language has changed considerably since its 1985 completion, as he likewise grants, then any attempt to restore its translators’ original intent should be welcomed rather than begrudged.
Likewise, in a private conversation with the spokesman for a major American Orthodox umbrella organization back in 2006, I mentioned that I had recently produced a Torah translation (the pilot for the current Tanakh edition) that featured gender-neutral God language. His favorable response was expressed as a rhetorical question: “Well, who could object to that?”
Indeed, while today we cannot know for sure whether the ancient Israelites—the original audience of the Bible—understood their God as beyond gender, only a gender-neutral rendering of its God language allows for either a non-gendered or gendered reading. If readers wish to assume that ancient Israel’s God was male, this new translation does not prevent them from doing so. In contrast, a translation that refers to God via He/Him/His/Himself hinders (if not precludes) a non-gendered understanding.
Granted, God language without pronouns can occasionally be less elegant and congruous. Pronouns do serve highly useful functions in English! Yet to many Jews, the cost of occasional paraphrasing and some loss of textual coherence is a small price to pay for the resulting gain in theological clarity.
As for the rendering of references to human beings, the act of interpretation that Prof. Lockshin called “going out on a limb” is surely what every reader of the Hebrew text must undertake, to the extent that we care whether or not women are in view whenever it makes a reference to persons.
Moreover, the biblical text’s peshat (plain sense) is what undergirds the classic halakhic midrash that Prof. Lockshin often cited. Consequently, a plain-sense translation like THE JPS TANAKH provides the baseline for grasping what our rabbis accomplished by their midrashic readings, and for appreciating their artistry. On these grounds, too, the new translation deserves to be welcomed.
When assessing what the Tanakh text’s wording meant to its original ancient audience, scholars can (and should) differ “for the sake of Heaven,” to use the rabbinic expression. Happily, in our contemporary striving for better understanding of the biblical text, the new translation—as the product of years of research into the conventions of the ancient Hebrew language, and into what went without saying for the composers of the Bible—will give today’s students of the Bible a head start in that conversation.
David E. S. Stein
Project Manager and Revising Translator
Santa Monica, California, USA
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