Neither male nor female: Poetic imagery and the nature of God in the Old Testament

1. Female language for God

The aim of the following is to consider in what way Old Testament language that uses female or male imagery in relation to God has a bearing on the ways in which God is portrayed in the Old Testament and imagined by its readers. It is argued that while God ‘is’ not male or female, the use of gendered metaphor in the Old Testament has a direct bearing on the ways in which the God of the Old Testament is conceived and presented to the reader’s understanding. ¹

In contemporary attempts to think and speak about God, nothing is so central and unavoidable as the biblical language itself, and especially its adoption of male and female imagery. The suggestive, and dangerous, power of such language is memorably expressed in Mary Daly’s dictum: ‘If God is male, then the male is God’. ² The saying exposes the capacity of the language to go to the heart of human experience and sense of self. It also identifies the preponderance of male language for God as the problem, with its potential effect of making female readers feel marginalized.

The attempts of female writers to mitigate such effects are by now well-known and have entered the mainstream of discourse in Old Testament theology and interpretation. Phyllis Trible led the way, with her re-reading of Old Testament texts so as to uncover male bias in their reception ³ and also by pointing to the range of imagistic Old Testament language that she claimed suggested a female aspect in God. For her, such imagery ‘tempers any assertion that Yahweh is a male deity’. ⁴ Trible has been followed by a large number of writers who have in some measure espoused the view that biblical language validates a conception of the biblical God as female. For some, the biblical language supports such formulations as the ‘motherhood of God’ or the ‘feminine face of God’ in the deity. ⁵

Claims that some biblical language implies a feminine aspect of deity have not convinced everyone, however. Objections to it take different forms. Elizabeth Achtemeier writes,

... by insisting on female language for God, the feminists simply continue to emphasize the nonbiblical view that God does indeed have sexuality. ⁶

On the contrary, David Clines argues that the Hebrew Bible ‘consistently represents the deity as male’, ⁷ and indeed that it everywhere reflects and exhibits thoroughly male values, which are projected on to the God of Israel. ⁸ These contrasting views show that there are elements in the discussion that need to be disentangled. One is at least implicitly theological or confessional, concerned to derive a view of God from the language of Scripture. For some, the issue is ultimately about the continuing validity of confessional formulae (God as ‘Father’, ‘Son’ ⁹ ). The other is more narrowly linguistic. Clines expressly declines to engage with theological or hermeneutical claims that may be derived from his observations about the maleness of the Old Testament God ¹⁰ and aims to focus only on what the Old Testament texts actually say. It is a question, however, whether the subject is capable of discussion in abstraction from precisely such claims. At stake is not only what the Old Testament may be taken to disclose about the nature of God but also the effect that linguistic usage about God may have on human experiences of self and power.

At the heart of the matter is what kind of connection exists between language concerning God and what is being articulated about the nature of God. Regarding female language for God, a number of texts feature regularly in the debate. Mayer L. Gruber names four texts in Isaiah, namely Isa. 42:14; 45:10; 49.15, and 66.13, as referring unequivocally to God as female. ¹¹ These all make a comparison of some sort between God and a mother. Clines allows that two of these are ‘female language about the deity’ (Isa. 42.14; 66.13). ¹² Certain other texts also regularly appear because they employ a ‘feminine’ metaphor, especially birth. Deuteronomy 32.18 is the most important of these. More peripheral to the discussion are texts in which qualities of God are expressed in language that are said to have feminine roots. Thus, the term רחמים‎, signifying God’s ‘compassion’, is linked lexically to רחם‎, ‘womb’. ¹³

Clines reviews in detail the texts that have been appealed to in this way and finds them wanting. For example, the claim that God is portrayed as female can simply be based on misreading texts. In Isa. 45.9-10, God is not, pace Susan Ackerman, ‘potter, man and woman’, but rather the text draws an analogy between Israel objecting to certain purposes of God and unlikely scenarios drawn from life. ¹⁴ On the birth-image in Deut. 32.18, what is decisive is the subject of the action, namely צור‎, Rock, and אל‎, God. Since אל‎ is always masculine, the phrase must refer to the action of a father in begetting. צור‎ too he takes to be a masculine image. ¹⁵ In Isa. 42.14, Yahweh is merely ‘like’ a woman in labour, in the particular aspect of crying aloud in contrast to previous silence; he is not actually a woman in labour. ¹⁶ Similarly, in Isa. 49.15, the rhetorical question, ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?’, far from depicting the divine faithfulness as feminine, affirms precisely the reverse: a woman may forget, but Yahweh, in contrast, will not. ¹⁷ Regarding the lexical link between רחמים‎ (‘compassion’) and רחם‎ (‘womb’), he objects that there is no reason to think that an abstract noun must carry over nuances from a cognate concrete one. This is especially the case since, apart from its use in relation to God, רחמים‎ is almost exclusively applied in the Old Testament to men. ¹⁸

For Clines, therefore, the ‘female’ language used in texts about God simply does not express a female aspect in the deity. The assumption of maleness in the deity is always intact.

2. Yahweh as male?

If Clines is right that feminine language in texts concerning God does not immediately point to a feminine aspect in God, does it follow that the God of the Old Testament is simply male?

It is widely recognized that certain leading metaphors for God in the Bible are male ones. The most important metaphors for Yahweh are ‘king’ and ‘father’. Kingship is directly predicated of God in a number of places (1 Sam. 8.7; 12.12; Isa. 44.6) and implied in the extended metaphor of suzerainty deployed in Deuteronomy. ¹⁹ Yahweh’s fatherhood of Israel is also asserted in a number of places. In Deut. 32.6, he is simply ‘your father, who created you’ (NRSV). And in Isa. 64.8, Yahweh is ‘our Father’, perhaps also intimating creativity, because of the parallel with the image of the potter who fashions the clay. The idea of Yahweh as father is present too when he stands over against the Pharaoh of Exodus, in which Israel is cast as Yahweh’s ‘firstborn’ in contrast to all the firstborn of Pharaoh and Egypt (Exod. 4.22-23). If Israel is ‘son’, or ‘sons’, in this and other contexts (cf. Deut. 14.1, Isa. 1.2), then Yahweh is tacitly ‘father’, rather than the modern, inclusive ‘parent’. To these leading male metaphors, others may be added, such as judge, husband, and master. ²⁰ Other kinds of language too suggest maleness, as when Yahweh speaks to Moses ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (פנים אל פנים כאשׁר ידבר אישׁ אל רעהו‎, Exod. 33.11).

Clines goes further and speaks of ‘the sustained language about a masculine deity throughout the Hebrew Bible’. ²¹ This consists partly in the grammar surrounding Yahweh, in verb, pronoun, and adjective, and also in characteristics of the deity that he takes to be expressly male, such as strength, proneness to violence, honour, holiness, and even size. ²² Strength as a male attribute is illustrated, for example, by Isa. 40.10, 26, 29, 31, in which Yahweh is depicted as going forth to war with great power. ²³

While one might query how safe it is to suppose all such characteristics to be exclusively masculine, the predominance of masculine language for God in the Old Testament must be granted. However, in asking what the Old Testament says about Yahweh, it is necessary to distinguish between at least two different kinds of question. The first concerns the ways in which the people of Old Testament times may have thought about him and how such ways of thinking leave their mark on the text, and the second considers how the Old Testament writers thought of Yahweh and how they went about articulating this. These two questions may lead to quite different answers.

Regarding the first, the call of prophets like Elijah and Hosea to choose between Yahweh and Baal, or ‘the baals (הבעלים‎)’ (1 Kgs 18.20-40; Hosea 2), is instructive. Those who ‘limped between two opinions’, in the words of Elijah (1 Kgs 18.21), may have thought the choice before them was between deities that were rather similar. Popular concepts of Yahweh almost certainly included the idea that he was a male god. Support for this is widely found in the inscriptions from the monarchic period discovered at Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd in NE Sinai and at Khirbet el-Qôm in the southern Judean hill-country, in which blessings are invoked ‘by YHWH of Samaria and his Asherah’, although it remains uncertain whether ‘his Asherah’ refers to Yahweh’s female consort. ²⁴ People in Israel, therefore, apparently shared with other ancient people the belief that deities were or could be gendered. It is striking that Elijah did not offer his hearers a theological discourse to make his point, but in effect a trial of strength.

The language of the Old Testament for Yahweh has its roots in the religion of the ancient Near East. In terms of religious history, the worship of Yahweh emerged out of concepts that prevailed in the biblical world. The names for God in Genesis furnish one example of this, in which the God who encounters Abram and the patriarchs bears the name El in various forms, which strongly suggests the god El who presided over the Canaanite pantheon. ²⁵ In the theologizing of Genesis, some sort of identification between El and Yahweh can be discerned. ²⁶ Other texts, such as Psalm 82, show vestiges of the ‘divine council’ idea, in which Yahweh presides over the assembly of the gods. In the adoption of such images from the ancient world, Yahweh is presumably presented as the chief god and male. Masculine language for Yahweh and the use of the masculine pronoun are rooted into this history.

In patriarchal ancient Israel, it is not surprising that Yahweh should very often be depicted as having recognizably male characteristics. But in pursuing the question whether Yahweh is simply male, we now shift the focus from how ancient Israelites may have conceived of Yahweh to the ways in which he is depicted by biblical writers.

3. Yahweh and poetic imagery

The conceptions of the Old Testament thinkers and writers concerning Yahweh can be pursued on at least two fronts, though we shall find that they are closely connected. First, in the realm of language and imagery, where male characteristics are often accentuated, we have moved into the same area in which Yahweh has been found by many to have female characteristics. In addition, in the discrepancy between popular and prophetic perceptions of the nature of Yahweh that we have observed, a further avenue is opened up, namely the theologizing conducted in the Old Testament’s inner dialogue with received or ambient conceptions of the divine. These two fronts deserve exploration.

To begin with language, what is the relationship between linguistic expression and what it signifies? The question raises the major issue of the nature of metaphorical language. In simple definition, metaphor expresses one thing in terms of something else. This means observing some similarity between two thoughts or linguistic phenomena, which, when brought together in a metaphor, produce new meaning. ²⁷ In recent thinking, metaphorical language, far from being merely decorative, has the power to shape our view of reality. Marc Zvi Brettler, following Max Black, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, calls it ‘the cognitive theory of metaphor’. ²⁸ In it, metaphor is not based simply on conceptual or linguistic similarities, but belongs inseparably to processes of cognition. ²⁹ If this is so, it means that linguistic choices have a direct bearing on the substance of what is said. Brettler and others take the point to apply also to the Old Testament’s language about God, which therefore cannot be detached from its concept (or concepts) of God. ³⁰ And this may begin to explain why the biblical writers chose to make extensive use of poetic imagery for God in the first place.

With this in mind, we return to one of the texts noticed above and the question of male or female imagery:

You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you;

You forgot the God who gave you birth (Deut. 32.18 NRSV).

There are legitimate questions about the precise meanings of the verbs in this verse. Clines showed that the verbs ילד‎ (qal) and חיל‎ (polel) could refer to a father ‘begetting’ children. For him, this was the preferred reading in each case, on the grounds that the subject is, respectively, צור‎, ‘rock’, and אל‎, ‘God’, and that these are both masculine. Many modern translations take the same view, such as NIV, with ‘the Rock, who fathered you’. However, this overlooks the important question as to what the image of a rock has to do with birthing at all. Plainly, a rock neither begets nor bears. NIV neatly surmounts this difficulty by depriving the ‘rock’ of its function as a metaphor, and making it in effect a soubriquet for God, and a male, ‘fathering’ God at that.

This move, however, simply deprives the language of its force. ³¹ The poem leading up to v. 18 is full of vivid imagery from nature depicting Yahweh’s care for his people, including the eagle that ‘stirs up its nest and hovers over its young’ (v. 11) and the ‘feeding’ and ‘suckling’ (וינקהו‎) of Israel with honey and oil and milk and fat (vv. 13-14). These images of the sustaining of the young by the parent are part of the poem’s variation on the deuteronomic theme of Yahweh’s provision of the good things of the land. Here, in contrast to the typically prosaic deuteronomic rhetoric, however, the language is adventurous and fearless of illogicality. Children are not ‘suckled’ with honey from the crag, nor is olive-oil obtained from rock (צור‎, v. 13). In this context, it would be odd to argue for the masculinity of the eagle that hovers over its young or to make much of the unvarying grammatical masculine of the verbs. The image of ‘suckling’ from a crag (מסלע‎) is not bound by the masculinity either of Yahweh or of the crag. The language invokes the plenitude of nature to speak of the care and bounty of Yahweh, and it does not invite enquiry into the maleness or femaleness of the players.

This is the context in which we encounter the ‘rock’ (צור‎) in a birth-image in v. 18. Rather than being a mere cipher for God, it is one among a series of striking metaphors. Soskice reads the preceding context back to v. 6 and, taking the birthing in v. 18 as a feminine image, notes the contrast with the ‘father’ image in Deut. 32.6 (where Yahweh is ‘your father who created you’) and says, ‘Paternal and maternal imagery in quick succession effectively rules out literalism, as does the astonishing evocation of a parturient rock’. ³² For her, the power of the image is self-evident, and she has deftly drawn attention to the capacity of the language to operate at the level of impact and suggestion. Indeed, this capacity of the poetic language may be presumed to be the reason why it has been chosen to do this kind of work. It is important too that she has brought a somewhat extensive literary context to bear on the meaning of the image in v. 18. ³³

Is this also relevant for other texts that have been alleged to indicate a feminine aspect in God? Isaiah 42.14 is one of two that Clines allows ‘is female language about the deity’:

כיולדה אפעה אשׁם ואשׁאף יחד‎

Now I will cry out like a woman in labour, I will gasp and pant (NRSV).

For Clines, the word ‘like’ is crucial here: Yahweh is not actually a woman in labour, but merely ‘like’ one, in the specific respect of crying out. Indeed, being ‘like’ one logically rules out actually being one. ³⁴ But this again raises the question why such language is chosen and whether it is appropriate to apply rules of logic to its interpretation. ³⁵ A first question, in this case, is whether the use of a simile to express the likeness of Yahweh to a woman in labour is different in reality from that of a metaphor.

The distinction between simile and metaphor has been found significant by a number of scholars in addressing the present question. For Achtemeier, ‘the few instances of feminine imagery for God in the Bible all take the form of a simile and not of a metaphor, and that distinction is crucial’. ³⁶ Her reading of Isa. 42.14 is exactly the same as Clines’. ³⁷ Seen thus, the biblical attribution of ‘father’-language to God is metaphorical, while female language for God takes the form of similes. Thus, while fatherhood is directly predicated of God, motherhood is not.

However, the relationship between metaphor and simile is not one of simple distinction. Soskice, taking issue with Max Black, finds that the disparagement of simile in contrast to metaphor is often pressed by invoking bland similes (such as ‘the sun is like a golden ball’). In fact, she argues, the use of ‘like’ in comparative figures is but ‘an aspect of superficial grammar’, and ‘ ... simile shares much of the imaginative life and cognitive function of its metaphorical counterparts’. ³⁸

In cognitive linguistic theory likewise, there is little substantive difference between them. Both involve the ‘blending’ that results from the convergence of linguistic domains. ³⁹ The point is borne out by a consideration of actual similes and metaphors in the Old Testament. For Hosea, Yahweh is ‘like’ a lion, a leopard, a bear (Hos. 13.7-8), a juniper-tree (Hos. 14.9[EVV8]), a moth (5.12), and the dew (14.6[EVV5]). As for metaphors, he ‘is’ a shepherd (Ps. 23.1), or indeed a ‘rock’ (Deut. 32.4). While these figures are formally different, they are in practice hard to disentangle from each other. In Hos. 5.14, Yahweh is ‘like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah’, but then immediately the term ‘like’ is dropped, and Yahweh speaks as the savage beast:

I myself will tear and go away;

I will carry off and no one shall rescue (NRSV).

Similarly, Yahweh is ‘like’ a tree, but then follows ‘from me your fruit comes’ (ממני פריך נמצא‎ lit. ‘is found’, Hos. 14.9[EVV8])’, where he adopts tree-likeness into his speech about himself, at the same time invoking a play on the name Ephraim. ⁴⁰ Metaphors are often implicit in an image, as when Yahweh ‘heals’ (Hos. 14.5[EVV4] Jer. 30.17) or ‘roars’ (Amos 1.2)—in this case, the lion-likeness needing no ‘like’—or digs ground and plants a vineyard (Isa. 5.1-2; cf. Ps. 80.9-10[EVV8-9]). They can often pervade a text, as when the ‘shepherd’ image is carried through Ps. 23, though ceding in the end to one of hospitality (Ps. 23.5). There can be complex metaphors, as when Israel is depicted as a garden (Hos 14.6-7[EVV5-6], with simile again flowing into metaphor ⁴¹ ), flourishing in the ‘shade’ of Yahweh, who is thus evoked as some overarching tree (Hos. 14.8[EVV7]), so embracing Israel and Yahweh in their respective parts within the same image.

It follows from this that simile and metaphor both play their part in the Hebrew Bible’s formidable linguistic armoury, and it is difficult to see much daylight between them as regards their function in speech about God. Simile can be as bold as metaphor in what it implies. The comparison of Yahweh to a juniper-tree (Hos. 14.9[EVV8]) has attracted emendations because of the alleged unlikelihood of such an attribution to Yahweh. ⁴² Both simile and metaphor depend for their effect on the power of language to suggest and provoke. Both suggest likeness in certain respects (with implicit unlikeness in others), the manner of the likeness being usually not spelt out but left to the reader to judge. It will not be based on logic, but rather on experience, analogy, and a sense of the context. In this respect, poetic effect and the sound of the words often play a part.

The linguistic image in Isa. 42.14 belongs within a passage that poetically evokes Yahweh’s resolve to bring about justice and deliverance for his people. In an image developed over the two lines of the preceding verse (v. 13), he is portrayed as a mighty warrior, כגבור‎, and a ‘man of wars’ (אישׁ מלחמות‎), who cries out and shouts aloud (יריע אף יצריח‎) and prevails over his enemies. ‘Prevails’ is יתגבר‎, the final word of the verse echoing יהוה כגבור‎ at the beginning (another case of simile melding into metaphor). The picture then switches to the image of the woman in labour, which likewise occupies the two lines of v. 14. Verse 14a first expresses a silence and holding back, with alliteration and onomatopoeia (החשׁיתי מעולם אחרישׁ אתאפק‎), and then gives way to the force of the birth-image, again with onomatopoeia and alliteration (כיולדה אפעה אשׁם ואשׁאף יחד‎). Here too, the likeness to the woman in labour is taken into the language that Yahweh uses of himself in the three first-person verbs that follow it. ⁴³

The relationship between the metaphors of the warrior and the birthing mother in this context has been well observed by a number of scholars. Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, in her study of Isa. 42:10-17, found the essential point of the juxtaposition of the images to lie in their ‘auditory character’, with the language used in the birthing image having further connotations of Yahweh’s destructive force. ⁴⁴ Brettler, following Darr, finds in the same juxtaposed images an example of ‘incompatible metaphors’, which, ‘though they are literally contradictory, may coalesce on the metaphorical level’. ⁴⁵ And Sarah J. Dille supports the interplay between them by adducing a series of texts from the Old Testament and the ancient Near East featuring their overlapping use. ⁴⁶ Her study shows how the image of the birthing mother, applied in some places to cities under siege, is capable of transformation in new contexts. Here, applied to YHWH and in tandem with the warrior image, it carries connotations of creative power and ‘undermines any implications of the yoledah being a figure of powerlessness’. ⁴⁷ In this understanding, applications of images may variously foreground or de-emphasize aspects of their ‘associated commonplaces’. They also satisfy the criterion of metaphoric coherence, by interacting with each other to articulate something new, in this case something new about God. ⁴⁸

Can we say, then, that this text testifies to a feminine aspect in Yahweh? We have seen that the likeness to the woman in labour is more than a passing similarity, but becomes a vehicle for Yahweh’s self-expression. It is part of a familiar Old Testament phenomenon in which human language is adopted, often emotive language, to disclose something of the nature of Yahweh. Hosea 11.8 is a parade example of this, with its depiction of Yahweh deeply affected by his need to act in accordance with both judgement and mercy. The Old Testament, it seems, cannot dispense with language that portrays Yahweh in human-like ways. ⁴⁹ This point holds true for both feminine and masculine language, as we have observed not least in Isa. 42:13-14.

In response to Clines’ view that the feminine imagery says nothing about a feminine aspect in Yahweh, I have suggested that that view underestimates the way in which such imagery functions in the Old Testament’s portrayal of him. The kind of language favoured by the Old Testament’s poets is not adventitious, but has its inspiration in the challenges of speaking about Yahweh at all. Their use of imagery, both masculine and feminine, apparently functions to meet these challenges. While masculine modes of representation may predominate, there is nevertheless a parity of kind between masculine and feminine tropes as used to disclose something of the nature of the deity. The linguistic evidence does not suggest a contest between masculine and feminine characteristics, nor an amalgam, nor a compromise, nor a kind of alternation. So what does it suggest?

It may suggest, again with cognitive linguistic theory, that human beings find it hard to think or talk about God apart from their own experience, cultural, emotional, and intellectual. The existential freight of the topic is evident in the passionate nature of some of those writing about it, in the need of some, for example, to be able to call God ‘Our Mother’. ⁵⁰ However, there are indications in the biblical poetry that its forms of expression arise from issues inherent in speech about God.

The leading example of this is the book of Hosea. Here, if anywhere, one might find evidence for a ‘male’ God, given the extended figure in the opening three chapters by which Yahweh is depicted as ‘husband’ of Israel. Hosea’s relationship with unfaithful Gomer ⁵¹ becomes a prophetic sign of Yahweh’s relationship with Israel. The trope of Yahweh as ‘husband’ is explicit, for example, at Hos 2.18[EVV16]:

תקראי אישׁי ולא תקראי לי עוד בעלי‎

Call me your husband; no longer call me your ‘ba’al’. ⁵²

The attribution of the noun אישׁ‎, ‘husband’, ‘man’ in the sense of male, is striking.

However, this is but one strand leading into the web of figurative language for God in Hosea (some of which we have noticed above) and which poses the question precisely in what way human language can speak truly about God. Most importantly, the assertion in Hos. 2.18[EVV16] that God is אישׁ‎ is undermined by Yahweh’s statement, in the heat of his expressed dilemma between judgement and mercy:

כי אל אנכי ולא אישׁ‎

For I am God (a god) and not a man (i.e. a male, husband; Hos. 11.9b).

At this point of impassioned self-disclosure on the part of Yahweh, the capacity of human language to bespeak God is both affirmed (in the anthropomorphisms of revulsion and compassion, v. 8) and has its limitations exposed, because the leading anthropomorphism in the book is negated. The effect is to suggest not just that human language is unavoidable in the attempt to disclose something of God, but also that this author at least is keenly aware of both the possibilities and limitations inherent in the project. Enmeshed in human language, it is also predicated on the differentness of God. ⁵³

4. Gendered imagery and the one God Yahweh

These observations about the limitations of language lead to a further question, namely the extent to which an understanding of the Old Testament’s poetic expression of the divine is governed by the nature of Yahweh in particular. That is, how far is our topic a matter of religious language, and how far a function of the Old Testament’s theologizing about the God of Israel?

We saw above that people in Old Testament times may have conceived of Yahweh in all kinds of ways, because of conceptions about the gods that prevailed in their times and places. However, in considering the language of Hosea, we have already moved on to the next question, not what ancient Israelites en masse may have thought about Yahweh, but what the Old Testament articulates about him. We have observed that the Old Testament contains evidence of the emergence of its beliefs about Yahweh from its religious environment. But now we are focusing on the ways in which it developed fresh understandings of God. The most obvious element in the re-thinking of God is its belief that Yahweh alone is God. Yahweh is announced in the Old Testament without either image or consort. These factors mark a radical break from other ancient concepts of the divine, which are inseparable from the iconography of male and female images. Mono-Yahwism and aniconism make deep cuts in the imagining of God.

Indeed, the Old Testament is fundamentally transformative. Not merely a record of a people’s beliefs, it always mediates what has been received into something new. This is true both in relation to the environment external to Israel and to its own traditions. Examples of both abound. In the case of humanity as ‘image of God’ in Gen. 1.26, it has been well argued that, for the Priestly writer, this involves a translation of the wood and stone ‘images’ that ubiquitously signalled the victories and presence of deities in the ancient Near East into the flesh and blood of the human being, male and female. ⁵⁴ The text is evidently a reflection, in the context of a critical dialogue with concepts from the wider religious milieu, on the way in which God may be imagined, and it is significant that while it stops short of a representation of the divine appearance, it associates the divine ‘image’ with the human in both sexes. Similarly, the crossing of the Reed Sea (Exod. 14-15) is set against the background of mythological battles between deity and Sea (e.g. Marduk and Tiamat, Baal and Yam), transforming the polytheism of the former into a narrative of the historical deliverance of Israel by the one God Yahweh. ⁵⁵ This topos also illustrates the Old Testament’s capacity for inner transformation, with the crossing event, already doubly remembered in Exod. 14-15, finding new expression in Joshua 3-4 and in Isa. 43.14-21. This last text openly expresses its readiness for Yahweh to act in radically new ways (Isa. 43.18-19). ⁵⁶

At the heart of this tendency for re-presentation is the question of the nature of God. In the exodus narrative, Moses asks Yahweh what he shall say in answer to the people’s question, ‘What is his [God’s] name?’ (Exod. 3.13). It is a crucial juncture in the Genesis–Exodus deliberation on the relation of Yahweh to the God of the patriarchs, and behind him, the gods of Canaan. The well-known answer, אהיה אשׁר אהיה‎ (Exod. 3.14), is an unparalleled formula for the re-apprehension of deity in the course of a history yet to unfold. ⁵⁷

It would be mistaken to think that the Old Testament’s readiness to re-conceive Yahweh purges him of all residual gendered connotations. Even in the ‘new things’ text in Isaiah, Yahweh declares himself to be ‘your king’ (Isa. 43.15). The Old Testament’s discernment of Yahweh out of the ancient Near Eastern mix is not even or systematic. However, in its theological reflection on the nature of Yahweh, all previously existing conceptions are, in principle, put in question. Everywhere there are signs of contention between what has been thought and what may be thought. In Isa. 43.15, the idea of Yahweh as king is not essentially connoting maleness, but rather asserting a claim over against that of Babylonian Marduk to kingship, in the context of a revolutionary vision of creation and history. In Exod. 33, the cameo of Yahweh and Moses speaking ‘face to face’ is immediately contested by the mysterious vision of Exod. 33.17-23, in which Moses may not see Yahweh’s ‘face’, for that would lead to death (v. 20). Something similar occurs in Exod. 24, where a vision of Yahweh enthroned (24.9-11) is succeeded by the shrouding of Yahweh’s glory in a cloud, the person of Yahweh distanced from the onlooker by boundaries both visual and linguistic (‘the appearance of the glory of the LORD’, 24.16; cf. Ezek. 1.26-28).

In the Old Testament’s thinking about the nature of Yahweh, language and theology come together. For Irmtraud Fischer, linguistic imagery is an essential aspect of the Old Testament’s emerging theology. She derives from the Old Testament’s increasing monotheism the premise that all qualities of deity, as evinced by male and female gods in the ANE, must be embraced within the one Yahweh. Thus,

YHWH can be imaged not only as a man but also as a woman ... Metaphorical language about God can and must include female and male images to insure that YHWH transcends every human experience and condition, even innermost realities, which can become points of comparison for metaphors of God.

The prohibition of (male) images of God finds a counterpart in the abundance of linguistic imagery ‘that simply does not allow fixation on and enforcement of one image alone’. ⁵⁸

5. Conclusion

The foregoing essay arose out of a contemporary question, prompted by the impulse to re-read the Old Testament so as to include feminine categories, especially in its conceptualizing of the deity. To the voices that have claimed to discern a feminine aspect of deity in the Old Testament was counterposed the view, championed by Clines, that the Old Testament is indefeasibly male. I have drawn the following conclusions.

First, masculine language and concepts, in both human and divine realms, undeniably predominate in the Old Testament and its world. The prevalence of such concepts is an inescapable product of the historical givenness of the Bible, and especially of its emergence in patriarchal societies. Yet it does not follow that all biblical language and concepts are masculine. The female language and imagery has real communicative power.

Second, an important distinction was drawn between the conceptions of God that may be supposed to have prevailed among people of Old Testament times and the conceptions that may lie behind the uses of language adopted by the biblical writers to speak about God. While it is possible to document the overwhelming preponderance of male language and concepts concerning God in the Bible, it is also potentially reductive to confine writers within thought-patterns that are constructed chiefly lexically. This can occlude the nuanced reading of texts according to their unfolding sense or inner logic.

Third, the biblical writers are engaged in the theological project of speaking about the deity. This both explains their frequent resort to poetic language and suggests pointers to the reading of such language. Their use of poetry was an attempt to meet the inherent challenges to human language in undertaking to speak about God. Linguistic choices and forms are inseparable from epistemology. Poetic imagery is not merely decorative, but functions actually to disclose meaning. It also wrestles with the limits of the power of language to speak of God. At these limits, it both discloses and does not disclose. There was no essential difference between metaphor and simile in this regard. Both these modes have the potential to enable certain kinds of mental conception.

Fourth, it follows that both masculine and feminine imagery for God participate in the Old Testament’s disclosure of aspects of God. To this extent, it is true to say that certain texts suggest a female aspect of the deity. When modern female readers find language that appeals to their own experience and contributes to their conception of God, this does not merely arise out of their existential situation, but has real anchors in the biblical text. However, the effect of this is not to distinguish between male and female aspects of deity or set them somehow over against each other; rather, the male and female language functions to express an inclusive divine association with the human.

In the ‘otherness’ of the biblical language for God modern readers are faced with a decision about how to relate to it. On the question whether male language for God in the Bible entails a conception of God as masculine, modern writers divide. Sallie McFague finds the particularity of masculine formulae unacceptable and so offers a reconstructed concept of Jesus as ‘paradigmatic’ of the relationship between God and the world. ⁵⁹ Marianne Meye Thompson, on the contrary, has argued that the language of Christian formulae, such as God as Father and Son, makes no affirmation about the gender of God, but rather that it serves to locate the user within a religious tradition. Thompson chooses to embrace the particularity. For her, ‘... it is impossible to reconstruct the biblical narrative so as to completely eliminate its particularism’. ⁶⁰

The biblical text, as a thing in itself, cannot be made into something that it is not. However one reads it, the sheer otherness of its language and cultural worlds is unavoidable. Yet in the ‘world before the text’, good readings know and understand the gulf that lies between this world and those. Where the Bible is read with an interest in what it may say about God, it is an engagement with something that stands over against our own world and is not assimilated by it. The acts of reading and hearing invite identification and assent. Yet they depend too on processes of ‘translation’ both overt and implicit. In this way, the ‘interested’ reading of the Bible, in ‘the world before the text’, embraces the paradox of involvement and alienation. As we have observed, the biblical authors were themselves engaged in negotiating received concepts and language and did so in ways that have left the marks of transition and transformation. Modern readers may see in their reading something analogous to this.