The Grammar of Social Gender in Biblical Hebrew

When does the Hebrew Bible's masculine or "male" wording allow for women to be in view? This paper addresses that question via a philological (inductive) approach, taking the biblical corpus as a whole and distilling the rules of its linguistic system according to a plain-sense reading of the text. The investigation focuses on what the biblical text seems to expect of its readers with regard to construing the social-gender import of three linguistic usages: second-person masculine singular address; third-person masculine singular references; and "male" nouns (i.e., those with specifically female counterparts), including אִיש, אָב, אָח and בּן It finds that women may be in view given any of these types of language. For all of the usages discussed, this paper supplements or supersedes the standard grammars; it also touches on several implications for translation and exegesis.