Not Only a Father

From the point of view of grammatical gender, the God of the Old Testament, when called by whatever name, is masculine singular. Yet the Old Testament was written in a world where gods were notably sexual, and the Bible fought against Canaanite fertility cults. One must ask whether this grammatical masculinity is accidental or essential to the Old Testament.¹

Hebrew has only masculine and feminine with no undefined or neuter option. God has a name, Yahweh. The other common designation, Elohim, means God, a plural word treated as masculine singular, even suggested by some as coming from some kind of bisexual plural word.² Indeed, Biblical Hebrew does use Elohim of a goddess (1 Kings 11:5, 33). Elohim is also used in Genesis 1:26-27 of the creation of humanity (male and female) in the image of God.³ Nonetheless, the suggestion of a bisexual plural is a mere curiosity. One cannot prove it. (This is similar to the less frequent suggestion that the final Hé of YHWH is a feminine ending).⁴ However, Hebrew language required people to call God either “she” or “he”.⁵ There was no alternative. In this patriarchal and male centred culture, the choice of “she” was hardly possible.⁶ Thus, grammatical gender may not imply that one must view God as “masculine”. To decide this we must look at the imagery used.

The panoply of domains from which titles and imagery of the deity are drawn throughout the Ancient Near East is the same basic repertory that Israel draws upon. In Israel, however, there is a decided diminution of analogies from nature and an emphatic concentration of the analogies in the historical and social domains, with particular focus on the deity as leader, ruler, and defender of his people.⁷

The contrast between Yahweh and the “gods of Canaan” is not about imagery and myth, but about meaning. Hebrew religion grew in the experience of Exodus and covenant,⁸ conscious of being different from all other religion and all other gods. When the Hebrews were becoming a nation in the Near East during the late Bronze Age (16^th to 11^th centuries BC), people who claimed authority relied on systems of myth and religion.⁹ However some people chose, or were forced, to live outside these systems. These ‘apiru (later Hebrew), those with itchy feet, the dissatisfied, the dispossessed and the plain rebellious, did not begin as a tribe or nation. They united as ‘outsiders’.

So much were they “outsiders,” that other established semi-nomadic tribes saw them as a tribal group.¹⁰ They lived as donkey caravanners, paid soldiers, or bandits. Under Moses, slaves in Egypt “opted out” and thus became ‘apiru.¹¹ An ‘apiru god, outside social and power structures, could not be a king with a heavenly court. “He” must be radically different from the deities of Canaan and Egypt. “His” realm was the history of the oppressed, not the mythology of oppressors.

This difference affects the imagery used to speak of Yahweh:

A series of socio-political epithets may be used to designate Yahweh-El(ohim), for example, as King (melek), sir or honoured one (’ădōn), shepherd (rō‛eh), judge (shōphēṭ ordayyān), father (’av), warrior (’îsh milḥāmāhor gibbōr) and even master or owner (ba‛al). But these epithets are used sparingly and reticently, probably because of various negative connotations already firmly rooted in Canaanite socio-political and religious praxis and ideology connotations which Israel struggled to purge from its own conception of deity or at least to limit sharply in usage.¹²

Thus, although responsible for the fertility of the land and of the womb¹³, Yahweh was not exactly like Baal, nor Astarte, for “he” needed no partner. To quote Gottwald again:

…as Israel reflected on the gender of the deity it was not in sexual-biological categories but rather in terms of the indivisibility and completeness of the deity. Yahweh has no consort and does not sire Israelite “sons” and “daughters” but creates a people by adoption.¹⁴

Parent imagery is sex specific. We can only speak of a father or of a mother, and no real parent is “genderless”. Yet Old Testament writing is not concerned with the sexual aspect.¹⁵ Its parent imagery is about covenant relationship, as in Jeremiah 3:19 (cf. 3: 22). “How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you a desirable land… I thought you would call me ‘Father’ and not turn away from following me.”

This is also true of the marital imagery of Hosea. Even when the sexual aspect is prominent, biblical imagery does not speak of Yahweh as “masculine” (or “feminine” in the case of, for example, the mother imagery we examined in Chapter 2). When God is the “father” of Israel, a specific event is usually in view. By liberating (event) the nation (as seen in Exodus) Yahweh is, or becomes, parent or father. This Father becomes father by saving (not by begetting).¹⁶ So this fatherhood is non-sexual and so not male, and not necessarily “masculine”.

Only twice the Old Testament has creation in view when speaking of God as Father (Isaiah 64:8; Malachi 2:10). More often it is about redemption (e.g. Isaiah 63:16; Jeremiah 3:19; 31:9). God is, or even becomes, father of people primarily as their rescuer or protector. Speaking of God in this manner means that first it is “necessary to go to what one could call the zero degree of the figure… to be able to designate God as father.”¹⁷ That is, by removing the things central to the very definition of human fatherhood, i.e. begetting through intercourse, we can dare to speak of “him” as father. We dare not think of God as begetting in a human sense.

The normal view in the Old Testament, then, sees Yahweh as greatly contrasting with the sexual gods and goddesses of surrounding cultures. Although grammatically masculine, in no other sense is God either male-not-female, or “masculine”-not-“feminine”.¹⁸