In Part 1 of this series I outlined the issue with the Greek word anthropos and Joel Hoffman’s claim that this word has a male meaning component. I showed that the word is used only extremely rarely to contrast with words meaning “woman”. I also linked to evidence that the word is used of specific women, although rarely and never in the New Testament, in which case it has feminine grammatical gender.

At this point I want to introduce my readers to the concept of markedness. This is an important idea in linguistics, one which was first developed in the field of phonology but is now proving useful in describing other aspects of languages.

Steve Runge helped me to learn more about markedness in a series of posts earlier this year on his NT Discourse blog. The most important post for this discussion is the first one; in his other with the markedness tag he applies this theory to Greek verbs and discourse. Here is part of Steve’s introduction:

Markedness is an organizational framework for taking a complex set of data and organizing it into meaningful groupings to facilitate description of the members. The organization is accomplished by taking the most simple, basic member of the set, and using it as the canon against which the other members are contrasted. The most basic member is referred to as the default. The other members of the set are then described by how each differs from the default and from the other members. The default option is the one used when, to paraphrase the Hallmark commercial, “you do not care enough to send the very best.” In other words, when there is nothing special that one wants to signal as present, the default is the natural choice. For this reason, the default is generally the most frequently occurring member of the set. It does not signal or mark the presence of any special feature. In this way the default is also called the unmarked option.

This system that I have described is an asymmetrical approach to markedness, where each different member of the set marks the presence of a different, unique feature. There is another approach to markedness that is far more widely known within NT studies, though it is not used nearly so prevalently in linguistics proper. I mention it here for clarity sake, knowing that it may cause confusion for some. The intention is to show what I do not mean by markedness when I use the term.

The second approach to markedness is the symmetrical one. …

At this point I would like to make it clear that I am also using the “asymmetrical approach to markedness”, and not “the symmetrical one”. Read Steve’s post for more explanation of the difference.

I would like to apply this concept of markedness not to Greek verbs and discourse but to Greek gender and gender-related words. Of course I can only do this very inadequately in the course of a short blog post – there is very likely enough material here for a PhD. But I would like to make some provisional observations based on my experience of how Greek works.

First, I think Greek makes a clear distinction between gendered lexical items and grammatical gender. At the lexical level one can distinguish between gender pairs of words which are very different in form, e.g. ho aner “man” and he gune “woman”; pairs which differ only in their ending, in effect declining like adjectives, e.g. ho adelphos “brother” and he adelphe “sister”; and words which can be masculine or feminine depending on the gender of their referent but do not change their form, e.g. ho diakonos “servant/deacon (male)” and he diakonos “servant/deacon (female)”. The word we are mainly discussing here, anthropos, fits in the third category, although its feminine form is rare and not found in the New Testament. Some words fit in more than one category: the female form of ho theos “god” can be he theos, as in Acts 19:37, or he thea, in Acts 19:27.

In Greek, as in all gendered languages as far as I know (certainly also in French, Latin, German, Italian, Russian and Hebrew), the masculine plural is regularly used to refer to groups of mixed gender. This is already a strong indicator that masculine is the unmarked or default gender and the feminine gender is marked. Further evidence of this, at least in Greek, comes from the regular use of the masculine gender in indefinite sentences, e.g. to refer back to the genderless pronoun tis “someone”/”who”, even when the sentence is clearly applicable equally to men and women.

So how might these principles apply more specifically to anthropos? I will discuss that in Part 3.

I’m sorry that this post is rather technical, and so may be hard for some of you my readers to understand. But in view of some of what I have read recently on blogs it is important to get these matters right.

There has been quite a lot of discussion on various blogs about whether the Greek word anthropos “means” ” man”, in any way to the exclusion of women. In particular Joel Hoffman has taken the position, here and here (see also this post), that

one meaning of anthropos is “man,”

and that in some places where the word is used

the Greek text means to emphasize “man” over “woman” … anthropos emphasizes “man” in contrast to “woman.”

I have strongly opposed Joel’s position in comments on these posts. Also disagreeing with Joel have been Suzanne McCarthy, here and here as well as in comments on Joel’s blog, and Kurk Gayle, here with links to several other related posts, also here and in comments elsewhere. See also Mike Aubrey’s related post, here. I also touched on this issue in two previous posts of mine, here and here. Read the comments on each of these posts.

In particular, I had to correct Joel for the following demonstrably false statement which he made in comment 5 here:

3. I still haven’t seen any convincing evidence from extrabiblical sources to support anthropos referring specifically to a woman. Did I miss one?

There is convincing evidence, provided by Suzanne, and Joel had earlier commented on this post showing that he had seen the evidence. I have twice asked Joel to correct this error. His response the first time suggests that he may have intended to qualify his statement with “with the masculine determiner”. With this qualification the statement would be correct: when anthropos is used of a specific woman or a group of only women it is grammatically feminine. But Joel has refused to correct or withdraw his original statement, which, without the qualification and so stating that anthropos is never used of specific women, is factually incorrect and highly misleading.

However, my main purpose here is not to correct Joel on a detail, but to look in more detail into why his overall approach to this issue is wrong-headed.

The essential feature of Joel’s argument seems to be this: because anthropos is sometimes used to contrast with words meaning “woman”, that implies that there is something male about its essential or core meaning. I consider this to be an incorrect deduction. The core meaning of a word is not found by looking at a few unusual examples.

This usage of anthropos in contrast to a word meaning “woman” is in fact rather rare in the New Testament. According to my Modern Concordance to the New Testament (Darton, Longman & Todd 1976), out of 552 occurrences of anthropos in the NT only five are “IN RELATION TO WOMEN”. Three of these, Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:7 and Ephesians 5:31, are direct quotations from the LXX Greek translation of Genesis 2:24, rendering Hebrew ish. So this is translation Greek – and as linguists know it is never good practice to study the characteristics of a language from a translated text.  A fourth case, Matthew 19:10, immediately follows one of these quotations and so can be understood as an echo of the translation Greek.

This leaves just one example, 1 Corinthians 7:1. I dealt with this issue as long ago as 1988 (long before I had a particular interest in gender issues), in an essay which I posted on this blog in 2006, in a section dealing with possible quotations in 1 Corinthians from a letter to Paul from the Corinthians:

A second characteristic is the use of ἄνθρωπος [person (anthropos)] in both 7:1 and 7:26 for man as opposed to woman, where ἀνήρ [man (aner)] is normally expected. These are the only unambiguous examples in Pauline writing of this use, except in Ephesians 5:31 where Genesis 2:24 is quoted. This provides added evidence that there is a quotation in 6:18, for in context the ἄνθρωπος in this verse is probably male. The similar use of ἄνθρωπος in 7:7, contrasting with the regular pairing of references to men and women in 7:1-16, strongly suggests that here also there is an adapted quotation from the Corinthians: θέλω δὲ πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἶναι ὡς καὶ ἐμαυτόν [but I want all people (anthropos) to be as also myself]. The similarity of this to καλὸν ἀνθρώπῳ τὸ οὕτως εἶναι [good for a person (anthropos) to be like this] in the acknowledged quotation of 7:26 is more evidence for this further quotation.

In other words, I am suggesting that this non-generic use of anthropos was a characteristic of the letter from the Corinthians, reflecting the dialect or idiolect of its author. It certainly doesn’t seem to be characteristic of the rest of the New Testament.

So we have effectively shown that this gender specific use of anthropos is extremely rare in the New Testament, being found only in translation Greek and in an exceptional case. This is already enough to cast serious doubt on the proposition that gender is a core component of the meaning of the word. But I accept that further proof is needed.

There is still a lot more that I would like to write about this issue, but this post is getting too long already, so I will continue in Part 2 and Part 3.

A few days ago I posted on The value of men, women and sheep. The issue I brought up there, the meaning and translation of Matthew 12:12, generated quite a lot of discussion on this blog and elsewhere. Suzanne, in a comment on one of Joel Hoffman’s posts, raised the issue of the rather similar passage in Luke 13:

Jesus Heals a Crippled Woman on the Sabbath

¹⁰ On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, ¹¹ and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. ¹² When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, ^[a] you are set free from your infirmity.” ¹³ Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.

¹⁴ Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”

¹⁵ The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? ¹⁶ Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

¹⁷ When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.

1. 12 The Greek for Woman does not denote any disrespect.

Luke 13:10-17 (TNIV)

Structurally this story is rather similar to Matthew 12:9-14, although here the healing takes place before the objection. Also the comparison of the value of a human being to that of an animal is only implicit in this story, but explicit in Matthew 12:12. However, the two passages cannot be considered parallel passages. That is because the Matthew passage has much closer parallels in Mark 3:1-6 and Luke 6:6-11 – although only Matthew makes the human-animal comparison explicit.

Interestingly in Luke’s account of the man with the withered hand he is initially introduced as anthropos, i.e. his gender is not specified, but later referred to as aner, confirming that he is male. This may be simply stylistic variation, but from memory it is not the only place where Luke has aner and other gospels have anthropos.

But Luke balances his story of a man being healed in the synagogue with the rather similar story of a crippled woman being healed in the same setting, which has no parallels in the other gospels. Clearly Jesus showed no gender discrimination in his healing, and Luke wants to make that clear.

I did find one interesting translation point in the story of the crippled woman. In TNIV, and most other translations (including NLT and CEV, but not The Message), she is implicitly compared with an ox or a donkey, and considered to be of much greater value.

Now the Greek words used for these two animals, bous and onos respectively, work like anthropos in that they do not specify the gender of the animal. All these words can be grammatically feminine (without changing the form of the noun) when referring to a specific female: onos is feminine in Matthew 21:2,7, but masculine in Luke 13:15; bous is also masculine here and, like anthropos, in every case in the New Testament where its gender is specified. However, again like anthropos, when used in generalisations onos and bous are masculine, but this should not be taken as specifying the gender of the animal.

Thus in Luke 13:15 the translation of onos as “donkey” is correct, as this word is gender generic in English. But the rendering of bous as “ox” is more questionable. First we need to clarify what is meant by “ox”. Here is the definition from answers.com:

ox (ŏks)

n., pl. ox·en (ŏk‘sən).

1. An adult castrated bull of the genus Bos, especially B. taurus, used chiefly as a draft animal.
2. A bovine mammal.

[Middle English, from Old English oxa.]

Which definition did the TNIV translators have in mind? If the latter, then they are exegetically correct. But would it be normal language, among their target group of speakers of contemporary English, to refer to bulls and cows as oxen? I think not. The generic term in current use is “cattle” or “bovine”, or colloquially “cows” although as a country boy I find it strange, and a sign of city-dwellers’ ignorance, when male cattle are called cows.

I would suggest that the word “ox” is more or less obsolete in modern English. If it is used at all, it is used in the rather specific sense 1 I quoted above, of an adult castrated male bovine. This is probably how it is understood by most Bible readers today who have any real understanding of the word.

So, I would suggest that TNIV, while being carefully gender generic about humans, has failed to follow the same principle when referring to cattle. To be consistent, it should drop “ox” in this verse and 14:5 and find an alternative gender generic rendering.

“Ox” can remain in 14:19, 1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18 as these verses are about draft animals which in the cultural context probably would have been castrated males. But the cultural context in 13:15 is quite different. Here we have a person, probably an ordinary villager, who keeps one bovine and one donkey in a shed or courtyard and has to untie them to lead them to water. This is still common practice in the Middle East. And the bovine would normally have been a cow, a female – such families would have had little use for an ox but a cow would have been an important source of nutrition.

So in 13:15 I would actually suggest “cow”, as in The Message. I thought of “one of your cattle”, but that implies that the person has more than one whereas the text and the cultural context suggest the opposite. Thus “cow” is better. If anyone complains that “cow” is not gender generic, one can point them at this sense in the dictionary:

A domesticated bovine of either sex or any age.

But if a choice has to be made between a term with male connotations and one with female connotations, in this case of a comparison with a woman surely the more female word is preferable.

I hope no one thinks this is political correctness gone mad! My point is simply that translations need to be accurate. To use a gender specific term to translate a gender generic one, whether for humans or for animals, is inaccurate translation.

The ironic thing here is that in first century Palestine a cow, a female producing milk, was probably more valuable than an ox, a castrated male – at least to an ordinary village person. Jesus in his parable compares the woman to a cow, more valuable than an ox, or for that matter than the sheep of Matthew 12:12. Translators should not demean women by comparing them to something less than Jesus had in mind.

Not long ago I was discussing whether men and women are equally valued in the Bible, in the context of the translation “sons” or “children” in Psalms 127 and 128. It has been interesting to read scholars like Claude Mariottini trying to argue that the biblical author intended to value sons higher than daughters. But in the end their arguments have to be based not on the words in the Hebrew text but on their ideas of what people would have been expected to think at that time. This is a very dangerous way of doing exegesis as it effectively stops the Bible being a radical or counter-cultural document.

Just now a similar issue has come up concerning Jesus’ teaching. Joel Hoffman’s new blog about Bible mistranslations God Didn’t Say That is generally excellent, so much so that I put it straight on my blogroll. But Joel himself got into mistranslation when he called Matthew 12:12 in TNIV “an explanation in part, not a translation”. I picked up Joel’s lapse in the comment thread on his post. J.K. Gayle has also posted about this error, and the issue has come up in discussion at Aberration Blog.

Joel’s error is basically that he persists in understanding the Greek word anthropos as referring at least primarily to males only. Although at one point he accepts that “The Greek anthropos was both inclusive and specific”, at the same time he continues to claim that translating it as “person” “diminishes the specificity of the example” – which only makes sense if he understands anthropos at least in this verse as gender specific.

But this is wrong. I accept, in line with the standard Greek lexicons, that anthropos can occasionally have a gender specific sense, in contexts where gender is in focus and the word is contrasted with a specifically female word like gune. But there is no such context in Matthew 12:9-14, where there is no explicit mention of gender at all. While we assume that the person with the withered hand is male, we are not actually told that. As I wrote in a comment on Joel’s post,

There is nothing in the entire account drawing any attention to anyone’s gender. Gender is no more relevant to the story than the colour of the man’s eyes. To bring gender specific words into a translation is to distort the text by introducing into it an entirely irrelevant and extraneous issue.

This passage as rightly understood, just like Psalms 127 and 128, in no way suggests that male humans are more valuable than females. Instead we here have Jesus’ strong affirmation that all human beings, men and women, are far more valuable than sheep.

Sons are a heritage from the LORD …
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are sons born in one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.

… your sons will be like olive shoots
around your table.
4 Thus is the man blessed
who fears the LORD.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (NIV)

I know these psalms well in NIV and have always semi-consciously understood them as meaning that sons are more of a blessing than daughters, at least in the mind of the psalmist. But is this what was intended?

It was no surprise to me that the TNIV translators thought differently:

Children are a heritage from the LORD …
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.

… your children will be like olive shoots
round your table.
4 Yes, this will be the blessing
for the man who fears the LORD.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (TNIV)

(By the way, TNIV retains “man” in both these psalms for the explicitly masculine Hebrew word geber, while using “those” for the more ambiguous Hebrew ish in Psalm 1:1, in a formula otherwise identical to the one in 127:5.)

What came as more of a surprise was that the ESV translators have made almost the same translation choices:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord …
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!

… your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.
4 Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the Lord.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (ESV)

There is a footnote on “children” in 127:4: “Or sons“. This ESV rendering is even more odd because NRSV, following RSV, has “sons” in 127:3,4, but “children” in 128:3. But perhaps the ESV translators have looked back to KJV:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD …
4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.
5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them …

… thy children like olive plants round about thy table.
4 Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the LORD.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (KJV)

Coverdale (1535, as found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer), ERV (1885) and ASV (1901) all have “children” consistently, although Wycliffe (1380s) has “sones”.

So what is the issue here? In each case (127:3,4, 128:3) the Hebrew is banim. This word is technically the plural of ben “son”. But, as was well known even to the KJV translators (compare their regular rendering “children of Israel” for beney Yisrael) and to Coverdale’s sources (compare Luther’s (1545) rendering “Kinder”), in the plural the word normally has a gender generic meaning, referring to daughters as well as sons. Even the drafters of the infamous Colorado Springs Guidelines accepted this when they wrote:

(However, Hebrew banim often means “children.”)

And it was presumably on this basis that the ESV translators, who followed these guidelines, translated “children” in these psalms.

It seems to me that this is a case of the RSV (1952) and NIV (1978) translators (and, more surprisingly, those of NRSV (1989)) introducing and perpetuating an innovative rendering suggesting extremely damaging teaching, that sons are more of a blessing from God than daughters. This may be what is believed in some countries, e.g. China where, according to a 2004 report, nearly 20% more boys than girls are born because of selective abortion – a statistic which is becoming a threat to that country’s future prosperity. But this preference for sons was never taught in the Bible, at least not in Hebrew, and not in modern English until 1952.

It really is well past time for some of these misleading translations to be retired. There are similar issues with how they use the word “man” – see for example how “man” has been introduced into Romans 4:4,5, 1 Corinthians 3:8,12 etc NIV. RSV is already obsolescent, barely still in print. But this example shows that NRSV, still widely used in “mainline” denominations and in academic circles, now needs revisions. It also demonstrates clearly that it is time for NIV to be retired, and replaced by TNIV.