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.
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.
Thank you for your kind words.
It looks like today is going to be about sheep, and I’ll try to find time for a more detailed post later. For now I feel compelled to respond to one comment:
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.
I agree with this entirely.
You and I disagree — I think — about when andropos is gender specific and when it’s general, and for me that’s a matter of linguistic theory and investigation. (And I’m glad that this on-line network provides a forum for discussion.)
But whatever andropos means, I wholeheartedly support the equality of men and women, and I think I find support for that position in Scripture.
I would hate for my academic position about translating a word to be misunderstood as anything more that.
Thanks, Joel. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest anything other than that you “wholeheartedly support the equality of men and women”. Our disagreement is about the meaning of anthropos, to which I don’t think you have given proper attention.
Peter,
Thank you for the link.
Joel,
I have to agree with Peter on the general excellence of your blogs, both of them! I’ve also blogrolled your blogs at mine. Now, I wonder how you read Suzanne’s list? She has a wonderful post on a similar topic here.
Suzanne’s post is here
http://powerscourt.blogspot.com/2009/09/aner-either-male-or-female.html
We will look forward to your more detail post. Because unlike most blogs everyone who has commented here thus far would be able to say “for me that’s a matter of linguistic theory and investigation“.
Mike, if you and others are looking for more detail on what anthropos means, I will try to oblige in due course. But don’t expect me to put it into any particular linguistic theory. I don’t do theory of that sort. But for now I will quote what A.Admin commented on his/her own blog, a definition taken from Bibleworks but presumably quoted from an older source:
I note that only one subsection of this definition, 1g), is not entirely gender generic.
Mike and Peter,
How can resorting to linguistics help? Maybe in two different ways. We might, first, branch off into what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson do by considering the metaphor, anthropos in real life today (and by “today” I mean the twentieth century when they wrote their book, and the twenty-first when we now re-read it). The Greek word could be as inclusive as any prototypical category needs to be (with all the requisite minimal features).
Or we could get as “scientific” as Aristotle himself. If you look at how he uses ἄνθρωπος in The Generation of Animals, then you see how concerned he is with both the male and the female within the category. On pages 769a and 769b, he gets bothered with which sex is to blame for mutations. (It’s the female, of course!) He looks at animal species and their copulation and sperm retention and such. Then, when discussing periods of gestation, he compares: ἀνθρώπου καὶ προβάτου καὶ κυνὸς καὶ βοός. All that to say, a linguist / biologist like Aristotle – and a native speaker of Hellene to boot – finds that both sexes comprise the natural class of ἀνθρώπου.
Thanks, JK. Since of course it is the female who is involved in gestation, we can add Aristotle to the LXX translator of Numbers among those who used anthropos to refer to women. But to add to the evidence, here is Barclay Newman’s definition:
However there is a confusion about lexical theory in the citations given for the meanings “husband”, “son” and “servant”. These are not meanings of the word anthropos, but descriptions based on the context of the person referred to in each of these passages. In Luke 12:36 we know that the anthropoi are servants not because anthropos means “servant” but because there is a following reference to their master. Similarly in Matthew 10:35 we know that the anthropos is a son (or daughter?) because of the following reference to his(/her?) father. And in Matthew 19:10 we know that the person is male and a husband only because of the following reference to his wife. This evidence no more proves that anthropos means “husband” than that it means “son” or “servant”.
Peter & Kurk:
My point was simply that all of us comment on this blog have both read and thought about the subject of how language and meaning work, which is one of the major questions of linguistic theory.
For further reference, here is the Liddell-Scott-Jones (1940, transliterated) entry for anthropos, taken from Perseus (their old site is much quicker than the new one!):
If we bear in mind that this was written in an age where English “man” was frequently gender generic, there is not much in this entry to suggest that anthropos was ever used to specify gender. Note the last part of this definition: “Properly the opposite of thêrion “animal””.
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After a lovely day celebrating my birthday and enjoying the beauty of nature, I’m back in front of a computer, and I’ve put together some more detailed thoughts about anthropos. They’re here.
I just left a comment there, Joel.
Kurk, your reference to Lakoff inspired me.
Joel, my belated birthday wishes, and I’m glad you were able to have a good day out. I’ll head over to your new post now.
Perhaps I’m being naïve, but this is how I see it:
If I say, “I met an American yesterday who was on holiday with his wife”, does that imply that the word “American” is gender-specific? Of course not, it just means that its referent in this case is male. On the other hand, in other circumstances it might have a female referent: “I met an American yesterday who was on holiday with her husband”.
I would also suggest that in “ancient times” (NT and earlier) a man (as most writers and public speakers were) would be more likely to meet and interact with other men, and so usage like my first example would probably be more common than my second. But then what do I know? I’m no linguist.
Peter: Thank you.
John: You are right on the mark. We can deduce facts from context without those facts being part of any word in the context. Just to drive home the point, it would be most foolish to assume from Matthew 12:10 that anthropos means “man with a deformity,” or even that that is one of the meanings of anthropos.
Indeed, John. It might even be true that most people would say “American woman” in the latter case, as I think I would, but that still doesn’t mean that “American” is a gendered word like “Englishman”.
“While we assume that the person with the withered hand is male, we are not actually told that.”
This is actually rather amazing, because the Greek language does have gender-specific pronouns. But unlike English, it is possible to tell this entire story in Greek without using any of them. Contrast this to the story in Luke 13, in which feminine pronouns are used three times of the woman healed of a crippling deformity–not to mention the nouns gun and thugater.
We have to consider the possibility that the person with the withered hand really was a woman, but for whatever reasons Matthew chose to leave that information undisclosed by the ambiguity of the language he used. However, every English translator, no matter how egalitarian, has gone ahead and assumed it was a man.
But were they justified in doing so? Jesus, after all, used a male sheep in his example, unlike Nathan, who specified a ewe lamb in the parable he told David–even though it parabolically referred to Uriah, a man–perhaps to keep it from being too easy for David to guess the punch line.
Yes, but in the case of the crippled woman, Jesus used an ox and ass in a parallel example to justify healing on the sabbath–not a cow and a jenny.
Gender-sensitive translators have to be consistent. If the Bible doesn’t specify that a person is male, they have absolutely no business whatsoever using male nouns or pronouns to describe him. So what if it mangles the syntax of the story–they’ve already started down that path, and consistency demands that they finish the trip.
White man, do you know how gender works in Greek, or indeed in any language with grammatical gender? The gender-specific pronouns are masculine because they refer back to the grammatically masculine noun anthropos. They tells you nothing about the real world gender of the referent.
On this basis I would prefer a completely gender generic translation of the Matthew 12 passage, like the English one which Kurk Gayle posted.
I thought the ewe lamb in Nathan’s parable was Bathsheba, stolen from Uriah, and the poor man was Uriah.
Peter: Exactly. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. In French, the word for “person” is feminine, which means that “He is a good person,” in French, ends up with feminine words for “a” and “good.” If a women were called anthropos in Greek, the words associated with anthropos would still be masculine.
The topic of gender and animals is interesting. Most languages have a “default” gender for animals when it doesn’t matter which gender the animal is, and it varies from language to language and from animal to animal. In English (at least in New York), we use “cows” for “cows and bulls,” but “dogs” for “dogs and bitches.” (In Russian, the masculine word for dog doubles as a curse and the feminine is the common word.) We also have triplets, like “doe/deer/buck.”
(And at the risk of demonstrating my ignorance, the only time I use “ewe” is when I really don’t like dinner.)
Peter Kirk wrote:
“White man, do you know how gender works in Greek, or indeed in any language with grammatical gender? The gender-specific pronouns are masculine because they refer back to the grammatically masculine noun anthropos. They tells you nothing about the real world gender of the referent.”
We’ll put it this way: I’m learning. Thus I’m apt to make many of the typical mistakes of novices. So thanks for your patience. But–I don’t see any sex-specific pronouns in the Matthean account, because I don’t see any 3rd-person singular pronouns at all–and the pronouns that are there don’t specify sex. I’m learning that Greek gets along remarkably well without them. The only exception is the sheep, which I believe is neuter, with a neuter pronoun. The point I was making was that he could have used the Greek word for ewe like Nathan did in the LXX.
And you are right that Bathsheba was in view there–all the more reason to use a blatantly feminine example. David had many wives, but he took the only wife of Uriah. David didn’t gain much by adding to his harem–in fact, he had no need whatsoever for another woman–but Uriah’s loss was total when David stole not only the body but also the affections of his only wife.
And sure enough you are right that it’s possible to render the entire passage without mentioning the sex of the crippled person. But Luke tells the same story in the sixth chapter of his gospel, and uses the sex-specific word ANDRI.
Since Matthew made his version of the story ambiguous as to the sex of the person healed, I’m okay with a translator doing the same. That’s translation. But to pretend that we just have to assume that it was a man is not being faithful to Scripture, and I’d rather call him a man in both places than have someone wrongly assume that it might possibly be a woman that Matthew was talking about.
Well, this has been an invigorating discussion. Thanks to all who have participated. I can see both sides much more clearly than before.
Mark Twain experienced these sort of frustrations in learning German. This is how he literally translated “The Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate” into English:
It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm.
White Man, you are correct that in this passage there are no masculine pronouns referring to the anthropos. There is one masculine participle, ekhon “having”, but this is clearly masculine because of agreement with the masculine anthropos.
Yes, it is interesting that in the Luke’s parallel he starts with anthropos but later refers to the man as aner. But then Luke balances this story with the rather similar one of the crippled woman, 13:10-17, which is not recorded by the other evangelists. It is however a dangerous way of translating to take information from one gospel in order to translate another one, although I accept that occasionally it may be necessary.
Joel, ewe are right! 😉
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Peter,
You wrote: “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.”
But the truth is that we have to begin with the cultural and social context of the text. If we take the Bible to be a counter-cultural text, then we are doing eisegesis because we can then read anything we want into the text.
What I said was not that they Bible values sons more than daughters but that the context of Psalm 127:3 requires the translation “sons” rather than “children.”
Claude Mariottini
Claude, I’m sorry if I misrepresented you. But when I wrote that you were “trying to argue that the biblical author intended to value sons higher than daughters”, I was referring to this specific psalm, and not to the Bible as a whole. I thought that was clear from the context.
I certainly don’t want to presume that the Bible is a counter-cultural text. But I don’t want to presume the opposite either, and it is that presumption that I see in your arguments. Yes, we have to understand the cultural context of biblical texts. But then we have to decide, based on the text, if the author is going along with that culture or being counter-cultural. Some approaches rule out the latter alternative.
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