As promised in last Tuesday’s post, I’m going to use this week’s free post to talk about words for human beings.
By this stage in our story, we have two human beings and three words to refer to them:
adam, which I have been translating as “earthling”
isha, which I translated as “woman”
ish, which I translated as “man”
A 21st-c. Bible translation that pays close attention to such matters is The Contemporary Torah: A Gender-Sensitive Adaptation of the JPS Translation (CJPS). You can read the preface to The Contemporary Torah here; some of what I’ll be saying today is based on that book. Note: Sefaria (where that link goes) and JPS are collaborating on a project to extend the project to the entire Bible. I was offered some work on the new phase of the project but ended up not taking it. UPDATE: See this article on the revised translation:
Let’s look at some translations of just the very first words of v. 23 to see how various choices play out.
my translation: “The earthling said”
KJV: “And Adam said”
NJPS: “Then the man said”
CJPS: “Then the Human said”
CJPS ends the verse by saying:
This one shall be called Woman,
For from a Human was she taken.
And there’s now a proposed revision to CJPS that would change “from a Human” in that last phrase to “from the Man.” A footnote to the verse, which now explains that the “Human” is more precisely “the (formerly lone) member of the human species,” would be changed to say “the [other] (masculine) participant [in this situation].”
I don’t want to make light of these concerns, but I think it’s easy to push them much farther than they have to go. Still, this is a good place to discuss the various terms that Biblical Hebrew uses when describing human beings.
Let’s start with the word we’ve already seen 17 times — if I’ve counted correctly — so far in our story, mostly in Version 2 but twice, crucially, in Gen 1:26–27, the word adam. The Bible itself hints very strongly that adam was called that because he was made out of adamah ‘earth, soil, dirt’. (Two other Hebrew words that we will eventually want on the table for this topic are adom ‘red’ and dam ‘blood’.) It’s worth remembering also the implication of 1:24–25 that animals too come from eretz / adamah, eretz being another word that refers to earth or “land” (as opposed to sea and sky).
According to my Accordance Bible research program, which serves as a handy concordance (a way to check how many times a word occurs, and where, in a particular text), adam ‘man’ occurs 545 times, in 520 biblical verses. Its exact homonym adam meaning “Adam” the named character occurs just 9 times, first in Gen 2:20 and just once anywhere after Genesis 5: That name, “Adam,” is the first word of the book of Chronicles.
As we mentioned when we first saw Adam the name, various translations, ancient and modern alike, disagree on when adam is being used as a name and when it simply refers to a human being. If we follow the rules of Hebrew grammar and the vowels indicated by the Masoretic text, though, the count of 9 seems fairly secure.
I’ll remind you that the markings we use to indicate vowel sounds in Hebrew were not invented until about 10 or 12 centuries ago, which means that for the first several millennia of the life of the Bible there was no way to look at the three Hebrew letters אדם in isolation and have any idea whether they meant Adam or red or human. What we can say is that they refer to humanity in general hundreds of times, and to Adam or to the word adom ‘red’ no more than we can count on our fingers.
The new words introduced in vv. 22–23, אשה isha and איש ish, mean “woman” and “man” respectively. Despite their sound and what the earthling says, these two words are not etymologically related. When they are used together, it is quite clear that they refer to female and male human beings. When they are not used as a pair, things get more complicated.
First, an ish can be a person, whether male or female. Next, an ish does not even have to be a human being. In Exod 15:3, where modern translations like to call YHWH a “warrior,” the Hebrew more literally calls him אִ֣ישׁ מִלְחָמָ֑ה ish milḥama ‘a man of war’. Moreover, ish and isha are the normal words you would use for “each” in Biblical Hebrew, depending on whether you are speaking about someone or something that is masculine or feminine. The cloths that make up the Tabernacle are to be joined אִשָּׁ֖ה אֶל־אֲחֹתָ֑הּ isha el-aḥotah, literally “a woman to her sister,” but simply meaning “to each other,” using the feminine words because the cloth is a יריעה yeria, a feminine noun.
Here are the words we’ve been discussing, and a few others for good measure, from the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew:
אָדָם I 548.31.101.2 n.m. human being
אָדָם IV 9.1.8 pr.n.m. Adam
אִישׁ I †2179.80.466.9 n.m. man & אִשָּׁה 782.42.57.7 n.f. woman
אֱנוֹשׁ I 42.19.25 n.m. person
גֶּ֫בֶר I 66.8.22 n.m. man & גְּבִירָה 15.1 n.f. lady
מְתִים (always plural) 22.2.2 n.m. man
The first number after each noun indicates how many times the word occurs in the Bible. (The others are for Ben Sira, inscriptions, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.) There are also, of course, words for old and young people, for males and females, and perhaps once (in 2 Kgs 24:15) the word אֱוִיל matching Akkadian awīlu, the word used for “a man” in the laws of Hammurabi.
I’ll end with these final remarks:
I’m going to drop “earthling” from now on because using it has lost most of its point by now.
I’m going to try to translate responsibly and clearly but without fixating on these gender questions more than seems necessary.
There’s one final point that seems important to discuss at least briefly before we move on to finish Genesis 2.
Tamara Cohn Eskenazi of HUC in Los Angeles writes, in her article “Non-Gender Equality at Creation,” that Genesis 2 matches Genesis 1, because until an isha is built out of the adam there is no ish either — and therefore we should not understand that woman was created from man, but that an original human was separated into the two sexes. This seems mistaken to me, since the plot element of Genesis 2 is how to fix the situation of ha-adam not having a mate. But you can read her column (and the column of Raanan Eichler that she’s responding to) for yourselves and judge.
Next time, we’ll continue on to the last verse of Genesis 2.
Additional note: A נפשׁ (nefesh) can also mean a human being, as in our expression "not a soul," meaning "no one." But that word is also used in a number of other ways and it would be somewhat complicated to find the ones that mean "a person." See Lev 2:1 for an example. You can read more about this in my book The Bible’s Many Voices; see pp. 217–218.