With great confidence and little evidence, Mark Sameth recently wrote in the New York Times that the Tetragrammaton was originally meant to be read backward, so that it was pronounced as the Hebrew equivalent of “he-she.” To this the author adds further ostensible proofs that the God of the Hebrew Bible “was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered deity,” as well as other alleged examples of biblical “gender fluidity.” Robert A.J. Gagnon doesn’t buy it:

It is true that the Hebrew Bible describes God in both masculine (predominantly) and feminine imagery. However, for God to transcend gender is not the same as His being “transgender”—which refers to a person’s abandoning his or her birth sex for a self-constructed . . . self-image. It is no mere coincidence that God is never [imagined] as Israel’s wife (or, [in the New Testament], as the church’s), but always as her husband, nor that God is never addressed as “Mother.”

Sameth’s purported evidence for a “highly elastic” view of gender in the Hebrew Bible is anything but. For instance, Sameth alleges: “In Esther 2:7, Mordecai is pictured as nursing his niece Esther. In a similar way, in Isaiah 49:23, the future kings of Israel are prophesied to be ‘nursing kings.’” While the feminine participle omenet refers to a woman who nurses a child (2 Samuel 4:4 and Ruth 4:16), the masculine participle omen can simply designate a male “guardian,” “attendant,” or “foster father” of children. . . .

Sameth opines that in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, “well-expressed gender fluidity was the mark of a civilized person,” and “the gods were thought of as gender-fluid.” In point of fact, there were many strictures against “gender fluidity” in the ancient Near East (e.g., men who assumed the role of women were generally denigrated). . . .

Sameth has based his arguments on his left-of-center sex ideology, and not at all on a credible historical reading of the biblical text in context. His Times op-ed piece is historical revisionism at its worst.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.