The Jewish Bible: A JPS Guide

The Matter of Gender in the JPS Torah Translation

The Matter of Gender in the JPS Torah Translation H arry Orlinsky, the editor-in-chief of the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) translation of the Torah (1962), lectured widely on what at that time was a new topic in translation: gender. He would point out that the best-known Bible versions have too often rendered certain Hebrew nouns as referring to men, thus making women appear relatively invisible. For example, the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) in the classic King James Version (KJV) of 1611 has God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers [avot] upon the children” (Exod. 20:5) even though logic dictates—and other biblical passages indicate—that also in view were mothers and their sins. Orlinsky saw such customary renderings as misrepresenting the biblical text, and in his opinion, the solution lay in a contextual, idiomatic approach to translation—of which NJPS was the exemplar. (NJPS reads: “visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children.”) He would reiterate that the NJPS approach has no inherent ideological bias but rather “seeks to determine within the context and in the light of pertinent data elsewhere in the Bible and in related extra-biblical societies what the author meant to convey.” Where the Torah’s language suggests a neutral sense, NJPS avoids misleadingly ascribing gender, not only by rendering inclusively some “male” nouns but also by rendering masculine inflections and pronouns idiomatically rather than literally. Thus, for example, what KJV renders as “thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause” appears in NJPS as “you shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes” (Exod. 23:6). In short, NJPS led the way among contemporary translations in “gender-sensitive” rendering. References to Human Beings Like every translation, NJPS contains some internal inconsistencies. For example, NJPS renders avot in the same phrases and in similar contexts using terms with differing social-gender senses—NJPS reads “parents” in Exodus 20:5 (as noted earlier), yet “visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children” in Numbers 14:18. Meanwhile, at times the NJPS translators rendered in unduly male terms. For example, the Hebrew wording in Numbers 14 is ambiguous as to who is to be punished for brazen faithlessness: the men or the people as a whole. Seeking the plain sense, the translators quite reasonably opted for the latter view. Yet to 51 The Jewish Bible render two Hebrew phrases that do not themselves specify gender, they employed English idioms at odds with their overall interpretation. We read that Moses urges an incensed God not to “slay the people to a man” (14:15) and that God then condemns a generation of Israelites to die in the wilderness “to the last man” (14:35). Ironically, in some other cases NJPS reads neutrally where a noninclusive rendering is actually called for. For example, NJPS could render yeled contextually as “lad, boy” (for example, Gen. 4:23, 37:30); yet it unconventionally casts the plural yeladim as “children” in Genesis 32:23 even though in that context the term can refer only to Jacob’s sons (not to his daughter, Dinah). Similarly, NJPS renders the noun edah five different ways in the Torah; yet its rendering states that Moses was instructed to take a census of the Israelite “community” (edah [Num. 1:2]), although ancient censuses counted men only. And unlike prior translations, NJPS renders banim as “children” in Leviticus 10:13–15, although the topic is donations that are restricted to priests—that is, Aaron’s “sons.” In a number of other instances, the NJPS translators appear to have based their rendering on an inaccurate understanding of social gender in the biblical setting. For example, where God refers to Abram’s eventual death as going “to your avot” (Gen. 15:15; cf. 47:30), NJPS seems to have relied on a modern scholarly opinion that the Israelites counted only their male forebears (“fathers”) as kin. Yet that view appears to be based on an etymological fallacy, meanwhile ignoring ample circumstantial evidence that suggests ancient Israelites also viewed their deceased mother and even her forebears as kin. The weight of the evidence argues for rendering avot inclusively here as “ancestors” or the like. Last but not least, the NJPS translators employed the standard English style of using male nouns and pronouns where a neutral sense was meant, which closely correlates with Hebrew grammatical structure. Unfortunately, this has proven ambiguous with regard to gender: it can be difficult to tell...