A Transgender Pronoun (Gen 7:2)
The Flood
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2 and from the animals that are not kosher וּמִן־הַבְּהֵמָ֡ה אֲ֠שֶׁר לֹ֣א טְהֹרָ֥ה הִ֛וא
When I was a kid in Hebrew school, we had a chant that went this way:
mi is ‘who’
who is ‘he’
he is ‘she’
dog is ‘fish’
When I learned more, I added a line of my own:
It turns out that sometimes who is she. It’s not about sexual politics (we presume) but yes, that is Biblical Hebrew displaying a transgender pronoun, one that is spelled הוא hu like a masculine form but (vowel-)pointed הִוא hee like a feminine one. In fact, that’s the way the 3rd feminine singular pronoun is written almost all the time in the first five books of the Bible.
We saw (and ignored) this form in 2:12, 3:12, 3:20, and 4:22. Now we see it again, and I’ve decided it’s time to talk about it. What is the big deal? The big deal is that such a distinct difference between the Torah / Pentateuch and all the rest of the books in the Hebrew Bible seems like a way to look behind the scenes and understand more about the history of the biblical text and how it came together.
What’s technically going on here is that the text is written one way while it is supposed to be read a different way. This is actually an extremely common phenomenon, one that goes far beyond the example we’re looking at today, one that has a convenient name: ketiv and qere (rhyme them with “Steve” and “Jay”). We’ll talk about it at much greater length when we reach the first of them in the Bible, at 8:17. If you really can’t wait, read more about it now on pp. 39–42 of The Bible’s Many Voices and/or listen to Episode 7 of the companion podcast.
These forms are noted in the margins of the traditional text, with two exceptions. One of them is the qere perpetuum YHWH. That is, whenever you see these four letters written in the text, you know that you “perpetually” are instructed to read them differently than they are written. The other exception they don’t bother to write in the margins is ours, the “misspelled” 3rd feminine singular pronoun. It’s spelled the standard way just a handful of times — I was always taught the count was 11; now I’ve seen scholars cite 18, and when I counted them myself I found 15. Over 200 are spelled the unusual way.
The unusual spelling does happen three times (I believe) in the rest of the Bible. Still, it’s a clear difference: a strange “transsexual” spelling that is normal in the Torah and rare anywhere else. Yes — if you are wondering — you will find it scattered through all five books of the Pentateuch and, for that matter, through all the four postulated documents of the Torah: J, E, D, and P.
I was more or less kidding about this being a “transgender” pronoun. What it really is is epicene: like “I” and “you” in English, הוא works equally well for either sex — as long as you keep to the confines of the Torah, before the Masoretes spoil things by adding vowels. The explanation of this phenomenon has generally been one of these two theories:
Sloppy writing of י and ו often made it hard to distinguish between הוא and היא. The first Ketiv & Qere pair we’ll see displays exactly this difference. We must ask, however, why the switch is vastly more common in this pronoun than anywhere else, and why it would be confined to the Torah.
There was originally just one (yes, epicene) pronoun for the 3rd person singular which eventually split in two, though not until after the Torah was written. There is no such pronoun in any of the other Semitic languages, however. It would have had to be adapted from (Indo-European) Hurrian or Hittite. But why would Hebrew first adapt this and then get rid of it again?
Oh, yes, there is one more word in the Torah spelled the masculine way even when it refers to a female. That would be נערה na’arah ‘girl’. It occurs a couple of dozen times in the Torah, always spelled like נער ná’ar ‘boy’. (Both words can also be used for servants or underlings.) 14 of the female ones are in Deuteronomy 22, but you’ll find a handful in Genesis as well. Again, in the rest of the Bible na’arah is spelled the standard way, נערה.
And one more data point. The Samaritan Pentateuch always uses היא and נערה, just as a 1st-year Hebrew student would expect.
It’s true that the Hebrew language (1) was different in different regions of the country, and most certainly different in Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom), and (2) changed over the thousand years or so when the Bible was written. See my series starting here about Late Biblical Hebrew on my other Bible Guy blog.
I’ve now read at least four articles discussing the הוא/היא phenomenon, spanning the years 1982 right up to 2024, and haven’t been convinced that anyone has yet solved this problem. It’s such a tiny thing, yet if we understood it I’ll bet it would be tremendously enlightening about so many things in the Bible that seem bigger to us.
And now, for those of you who have been searching in vain for she in the English of our verse, an explanation of what this pronoun is actually doing in the first place. I’ll line up the Hebrew and the English below so you can see what work הִוא is doing there.
וּמִן־ ‘and from’
הַבְּהֵמָ֡ה ‘the animals’
אֲ֠שֶׁר ‘that’
לֹ֣א ‘not’
טְהֹרָ֥ה ‘kosher’
הִ֛וא ‘are’
Whoa! A pronoun that means “are”? Yes, kind of. Let me explain.
Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have, or at least doesn’t use, a verb corresponding to English is/are. The copula (as this would be called linguistically) is either left out and taken for granted (“me Tarzan”) or replaced by the appropriate pronoun. Example: יְ׳הוָ֖ה ה֥וּא הָאֱלֹהִֽים YHWH hu ha-elohim ‘YHWH is the God!’ (1 Kgs 18:39). In our verse, the are of “animals that are not kosher” is הִוא hee, the “transgender” pronoun with masculine spelling and feminine vowelling.
Next time, we’ll go up, up, and away to the birds of v. 3.