A New Hebrew Bible Translation Forsakes Elegance and Accuracy for Gender-Neutral Language

Last year, the Jewish Publication Society released a revised, “Gender-Sensitive Edition” of the Tanakh (RJPS) meant to update or replace its widely used 1985 new edition (NJPS). Martin Lockshin acknowledges that this new approach yields some reasonable or even felicitous results, but points to many that are neither:

RJPS sometimes elegantly accomplishes the goal of making the English less gendered. For example, nothing is lost when NJPS’s reference to God as “The Rock!—His deeds are perfect,” becomes in RJPS “The Rock!—whose deeds are perfect” (Deuteronomy 32:4). At other times, RJPS substitutes clumsy prose for gendered language. . . .

RJPS makes the debatable claim that ancient Israelites, the original readers of the Bible, may have understood God as beyond gender. So RJPS never refers to God as “He.” In RJPS, the moving poetry of Psalm 78 contains 25 awkward uses of “[God]” in square brackets to avoid writing “He.”

Clumsiness aside, RJPS unfortunately distorts the meaning of many biblical texts in its quest to rid the Bible of gendered language. . . . NJPS translates Deuteronomy 28:45: “because you did not heed the LORD your God and keep the commandments and laws that He enjoined upon you.” In order to avoid using “He,” RJPS has: “because you did not heed the ETERNAL your God and keep the commandments and laws enjoined upon you,” removing the clear reference in the Hebrew to God as the one who commanded the laws. An important nuance is thus lost.

Read more at Lehrhaus

More about: Gender, Hebrew Bible, Translation

A Letter to the Liberal Jews of 2024

One of the phenomena Wertheimer discusses in that essay is the people who call themselves “October 8 Jews” to describe “their transition from slumbering complacency to vigilant activism.” But there is no small number of American Jews who slumber on, or remain half-awake, unable to process fully events that run deeply contrary to their assumptions about the world. John Podhoretz addresses this group:

[I]n the year since October 7, you have taken odd solace at odd moments, as when Israel comes under criticism for the supposedly indiscriminate tactics it’s using in Gaza. That wouldn’t seem to be a good thing, but it does allow you to express that wondrous complexity, according to which, yes, of course, Israel must be allowed to defend itself—but within limits, within reason, and certainly not with this brute at its helm. Gazans must eat! Israeli soldiers must be put at greater risk of harm to lower the death toll!

Does it matter that Hamas has rejected fourteen separate cease-fire proposals designed with that very purpose? It doesn’t. Because the harsh reality—that Hamas and the Iran axis are evildoers who seek the mass murder of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish state—is just not very complicated at all. [This truth] compels you to accept that the blessed gift of being an American Jew over the past century has lulled you and people like you into an entirely false sense of safety and security. From your privileged perch, you have spent decades viewing with withering contempt others who take in the span and arc of Jewish history and say, as on Passover, “In every generation, they stand against us to destroy us.”

So simplistic, you thought. So vulgar. And yet, so true.

Read more at Commentary

More about: American Jewry, Gaza War 2023, Liberalism