The piece, which is a setting of Psalm 51, alternates a five-part choir singing polyphonically with a single tenor (or in some performances the tenor section) singing plainchant. The most notable feature, of course, is the haunting high piercing notes soaring above the polyphony, which impart an otherworldliness and etherealness to the piece.

This performance is sung by the King’s College Choir of Cambridge University.

The Torah itself doesn’t have very much to say directly about the issue of gender; the issue was taken up by the rabbis of the Talmud and the later commentators. However, the world of the Bible seems to have been one in which there was a rigid separation between the masculine and feminine worlds. Compare the matriarchs’ and patriarchs’ roles in Genesis, for example: the men are hunters and warriors, while the women are stay-at-home moms. This doesn’t mean, however, that the women are without power or influence. Sarah basically runs the household and expects Abraham to do as she wants, even up to expelling her maidservant Hagar, mother of Abraham’s son and Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael—an action condoned by God after Sarah proposes it (Gen. 21:9–14). Likewise, Rebekah schemes to get her husband Isaac to bless her favourite son Jacob rather than her husband’s favourite Esau (Gen. 27). And so on through the generations: the women scheme to get what they want, like some caricature of a Medea or an Eleanor of Aquitaine. (Also, the other way in which the women in Genesis are used is as passive sex objects to be fought over: Judah and Tamar in Gen. 38 or the famous case of Jacob’s daughter Dinah in Gen. 34, whose capture and rape leads to the decimation of an entire city.)

Yet there seems, at the same time, to be a very interesting privileging of the feminine within the narrative of the Book of Genesis. In each iterative generation, a variation on the same story is played out between the multiple sons of each patriarch, and the result is invariably that the younger, less “masculine” son emerges the victor. Abraham’s son Isaac “wanders in the fields to meditate by evening” (Gen. 24:63; all translations are my own). When Isaac’s wife Rebekah is pregnant with twins, she gets an oracle from God that says that “the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23), and indeed this is what happens. The firstborn, Esau, was “a cunning hunter, a man of the field, but Jacob was a simple man, a dweller in tents” (Gen. 25:27). Jacob schemes to get Esau to sell him his birthright (Gen. 25:29–34), a most unmasculine act in this context. He then further conspires with his mother, as mentioned above, to get Isaac to bless him and not his brother, referring to himself as “a smooth man” in contrast to the “hairy” Esau (Gen. 27:11), and the ruse succeeds. Jacob gives his favourite son Joseph, his second-youngest, a coat of many colours (Gen. 37:3). Joseph becomes known as a dreamer of dreams, especially dreams which prophesied his eventual ascendance over his older brothers, and he passive-aggressively relates these dreams to his brothers, which naturally pisses them off (Gen. 37:5–11). Eventually, his brothers get so angry that they cast him in a pit and then sell him into slavery, but eventually his dreamer’s skill resurfaces when he accurately interprets signs in the dreams of Pharaoh’s butler and baker (Gen. 40) and then in the dreams of Pharaoh himself (Gen. 41), and he works himself up in the end to become lord of all Egypt. Finally, capping off this theme through the generations, the eldest sons of Jacob do not receive their father’s blessing at the end of his life. Reuben gets cast out of the blessing because he “ascended [his] father’s bed” (Gen. 49:4), i.e. had sex with his father’s concubine Bilhah (Gen. 35:22). The next two eldest, Simeon and Levi, are castigated by Jacob because of their decimation of the town of Shechem after the rape of their sister Dinah, as mentioned above. Jacob curses them–a curse which is worth quoting in full, since it speaks to every theme under discussion here (Gen. 49:5–7):

שִׁמְע֥וֹן וְלֵוִ֖י אַחִ֑ים כְּלֵ֥י חָמָ֖ס מְכֵרֹֽתֵיהֶֽם׃ בְּסֹדָם֙ אַל־תָּבֹ֣א נַפְשִׁ֔י בִּקְהָלָ֖ם אַל־תֵּחַ֣ד כְּבֹדִ֑י כִּ֤י בְאַפָּם֙ הָ֣רְגוּ אִ֔ישׁ וּבִרְצֹנָ֖ם עִקְּרוּ־שֽׁוֹר׃ אָר֤וּר אַפָּם֙ כִּ֣י עָ֔ז וְעֶבְרָתָ֖ם כִּ֣י קָשָׁ֑תָה אֲחַלְּקֵ֣ם בְּיַֽעֲקֹ֔ב וַֽאֲפִיצֵ֖ם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

Simeon and Levi are brothers, weapons of violence are their trade. Let my soul not come into their council, let my glory not enter into their congregation; for in their anger they slew men, and in their willfulness they uprooted oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it was terrible, and their wrath, for it was severe. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.

Thus, from the first to the final generation of the Abrahamic family in the Book of Genesis, the theme is complete: the elder—associated with hunting, warfare, destruction, and sexual desire and retribution—loses out to the more feminine younger. We will return to these characters and their apparently (somewhat) fluid conceptions of gender roles later.

There are only a few times when the Torah directly comments on gender in a legal context. We cannot address them all here, but we should note one of the most obvious: the deuteronomistic prohibition against cross-dressing (Deut. 22:5):

לֹֽא־יִהְיֶ֤ה כְלִי־גֶ֨בֶר֙ עַל־אִשָּׁ֔ה וְלֹֽא־יִלְבַּ֥שׁ גֶּ֖בֶר שִׂמְלַ֣ת אִשָּׁ֑ה כִּ֧י תֽוֹעֲבַ֛ת יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ כָּל־עֹ֥שֵׂה אֵֽלֶּה׃

The apparel of a man shall not be upon a woman, and a man shall not wear a woman’s garment, for anyone who does these is an abomination to the Lord your God.

Note that the same word is used here—to‘evah, “abomination”—as is used both times the Torah condemns homosexuality (Lev. 18:22 and 20:13). The word means something like an infraction against the natural order of the world—idolatry is also described in this language—and is one of the worst possible categories of transgression. It is not really clear where this prohibition comes from, and the context does not help since it is presented entirely on its own in a section that is a general collection of miscellaneous laws. One traditional Jewish interpretation of this law is that cross-dressing might somehow lead to promiscuity and adultery (an apparently serious variant on the “it might lead to mixed dancing” punch line). But recent scholarship has suggested that ritual cross-dressing might have been a part of pagan worship, especially pertaining to fertility rituals—we know that temple prostitution was part of such ritual worship—so this prohibition might be understood as a further way of distinguishing Yahwist religion from everything that everybody else in the ancient Near East did.

Whatever the reason behind it, the Torah’s specific prohibition against cross-dressing serves to sharpen the boundary between masculine and feminine. But as we have already seen, this boundary seems to have been less rigid the further back in time we go: in Genesis femininity seems to be rewarded in certain kinds of men, while the Deuteronomist seems to want to draw sharper distinctions. (Without going into the documentary hypothesis at great length, it is probable that most of Genesis is centuries older than most, if not all, of Deuteronomy.) And if we go even further back to the first story of creation (J source) in Genesis, we find that the act of the creation of human beings itself is presented as much more blended and harmonious between genders than it would later become (Gen. 1:27):

וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃

God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.

Note the somewhat awkward shifting of pronouns and referents: this does not appear to be as stark a separation of masculine and feminine as is found in the other, later (E source) more famous story of creation, when God takes a side (or rib) from Adam and fashions it into a woman for his companionship (Gen. 2:20–24). Instead, the Genesis 1 initial creation of male and female together, in the same body (depending on how you read the text), speaks to a blending of boundaries—or at least to a time when those boundaries were more fluid than they are made later by other people and other laws. (Compare the deuteronomistic separation of masculine and feminine to other deuteronomistic laws pertaining to the strict separation of certain kinds of mixtures in planting one’s field and in constructing one’s garments, at Deut. 22:9–11.)

Later Jews in the Rabbinic period would extend the male/female physical dichotomy, which is taken as a given in the Torah, apparently with the knowledge of the existence of intersex people and people with ambiguous genitalia. The Talmud refers to two categories other than male and female: tumtum (apparently someone without defined male or female genitalia) and androgynous (a Greek loanword meaning “man-woman” but probably being used to cover all other cases of intersexuality or genital ambiguity). The individual cases and references to these two categories are too numerous and complicated to digest here; I would refer anybody interested to this paper, written from a modern Orthodox perspective, for its exhaustive references (even though its medical knowledge is somewhat lacking). However, the basic point is this: there are many different opinions throughout the Talmud and the later commentators as to the legal status of both the tumtum and the androgynous. Are they obligated to observe all the laws? Which of the laws might constitute an undue hardship for them? Since primary qualification on observance of the laws is traditionally broken down by sex—women are not required to observe positive, time-bound commandments, for example—where do these categories fit into this structure? Suffice it to say the question is extremely complicated and by no means closed, especially as medical and scientific knowledge continue to advance.

The category of “transgender” is a relatively new one as far as the social history of our civilization is concerned. Until very recently, it was not possible for an individual actually to change his or her sex, and Jewish law has not really caught up with this fact yet. The sharp distinction between male and female that we started to see in Deuteronomy is partially a manifestation of an underlying fact about Jewish law and the Hebrew language work: there is no “neuter” grammatical gender, as there is in, say, Greek and Latin, and consequently there is no way to refer to anybody as anything other than, say, the “son” or “daughter” of another individual. Neither is there any mytho-historical tradition about transgender individuals in a Jewish context, as there is with other cultures: again, the Greeks (Tiresias, especially) come to mind—as do the Romans, but to a lesser extent—nevertheless, if you’ve never read Catullus 63, his poem “about a young boy who joins a goddess cult and castrates himself”, as a friend of mine once summarized it, you ought to do so at some point. At any rate, there’s nothing comparable to any of this in the Judaic tradition: to an extent, as I have already pointed out, the language won’t even really allow for it.

So where does that leave us, really? I think it leaves us in a somewhat odd place, different to where the discussion of homosexuality left us. There, at least we have a theoretical framework for conceiving the modern understanding of homosexuality in a Judaic context. But here, I’m not sure that we have an equivalent framework. What with the four categories already in existence in Jewish law—male, female, tumtum, and androgynous—you’d think there would be adequate resources to attack this question. But I’m not convinced that this is the case. Much of what is written in the Talmud and later commentators about the tumtum and androgynous is focussed on trying to determine whether they’re “really” male or “really” female for the purposes of specific laws (e.g. an androgynous is considered to be “really” male for the purposes of observance of positive time-bound commandments). While this approach may be able to be made to work for some people, I feel that it is fundamentally flawed because it only appears to recognize two “real” categories and attempts to fit, as far as possible, any aberrations into these categories. And I don’t feel that this is the right framework from which to approach the transgender category: the question of “is such an individual ‘really’ male or ‘really’ female” seems to me ill-posed at best and downright discriminatory and essentialist at worst.

What is needed, I think, is nothing less than a radical reexamination of gender categories. The rabbis of the Talmud knew that the world contained more gender types than could be accounted for simply under Torah law. Today, we know that there are even more gender types than that. But, as I said, I believe we can do better than approaching this problem on the level of determining whether any given individual is “really” male or “really” female. In this, we might do well to go back and have a hard look at our earliest roots—the people of Genesis—whom the Bible presents as playing, to an extent, with some preconceived notions of gender in their society. A critical reevaluation of gender is the only thing that will be able to bring about a framework for dealing with the question of transgender people in a positive manner.

A good framework for attacking this question does not really exist yet. It will be up to our generation to set the stage so that future generations will be able to know that they belong to a Jewish world that recognizes and understands them—and ultimately, inshallah, to a Jewish world that respects and loves them.

(X-posted to Feministe.)

For this essay I will only deal directly with male homosexuality, since that is the kind of relationship that the Bible expressly prohibits. (I will take it as read that the prohibitions on male homosexuality extend also to female homosexuality, since they have been understood that way by both Jews and Christians for centuries. Don’t give me any nonsense about the Talmud simply dismissing lesbianism as “foolishness”; female homosexuality is tolerated just the same as male homosexuality in virtually all religiously observant communities today: not at all. Whether or not this is supported by the texts is irrelevant.) I don’t aim to be exhaustive in this essay; only to give something of a flavour of several different methods of dealing with the specific Biblical prohibition of homosexuality, as well as to explore some modern approaches to the problem as practiced by Jewish communities today.

The primary source text for the biblical prohibition of homosexuality is Leviticus 18:22, which occurs in a long list of forbidden sexual relationships (all translations are my own):

וְאֶ֨ת־זָכָ֔ר לֹ֥א תִשְׁכַּ֖ב מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י אִשָּׁ֑ה תּֽוֹעֵבָ֖ה הִֽוא׃

You shall not lie with a man in the manner of laying with a woman; this is an abomination.

This prohibition is echoed two chapters later in the so-called “holiness code” at Leviticus 20:13, in another long list of forbidden sexual relationships:

וְאִ֗ישׁ אֲשֶׁ֨ר יִשְׁכַּ֤ב אֶת־זָכָר֙ מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י אִשָּׁ֔ה תּֽוֹעֵבָ֥ה עָשׂ֖וּ שְׁנֵיהֶ֑ם מ֥וֹת יוּמָ֖תוּ דְּמֵיהֶ֥ם בָּֽם׃

As for a man who lies with a man in the manner of laying with a woman, they have both committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon themselves.

Throughout history, there have been people who have engaged in this kind of forbidden relationship—the very fact that the Bible deems it necessary to prohibit testifies to the fact that people did engage in it, for whatever reason. But today, in a culture where a category of “homosexual” exists, with which people make their primary sexual identification, the Bible’s prohibition needs to be reexamined and rethought: this holds true for both the most religiously observant person alongside the most liberal individual. And this is the challenge of modernity: assuming the Bible’s injunctions and prohibitions still hold some meaning for us today, how do we understand them in light of our current world?

Essentially, it all comes down to one of three positions: (1) do you ignore the Bible for the sake of modernity, (2) do you ignore modernity for the sake of the Bible, or (3) do you try to find some “happy medium” between these two positions? I will argue that both (2) and (3) are endeavours doomed to failure, while (1), though workable and well-attested in the modern world, has its own set of problems.

Position (2), that is, ignoring the modern knowledge of that homosexuality is not unnatural in favour of the Bible’s contention that it is an “abomination”, is employed in virtually all extremely observant communities, both Jewish and Christian. People who reject the modern understanding of homosexuality and its origins in nature will often reject the underlying science as flawed, or not “Torah-true”, or what have you. There is no way for homosexual behaviour to be accepted with this type of thinking: since homosexuality is not a part of nature, it is by definition aberrant, and the Bible—which is taken to be divine and inerrant—defines it as an “abomination”: therefore, homosexuality should be shunned and punished.

Position (1), on the other hand—that the Bible should be ignored in favour of modern understanding—poses its own set of problems. If one truly believes it, one must follow it in every instance. What’s the use of holding, for instance, that the prohibition on homosexuality should be overturned because science holds homosexuality to be natural, but the Biblical account of the creation of the universe should be taken as true? This reduces to position (3)—the “happy medium”—and, as we will see, should be dealt with for its arbitrariness. So let us define position (1) as complete rejection of the Bible’s truth. This solves the problem of homosexuality, in a way: since the Bible is not true, there is no problem with homosexuality from a religious perspective. Yet there are problems here: how would a religious community based on the untruth of its fundamental text survive? What would it mean to be a Jew who disbelieves in the Bible? How would matters of ritual and law be adjudicated? (There are answers to all of these questions; I will leave them as an exercise for the reader.)

However, the most attractive position, on the surface—position (3), finding a “happy medium” between literal acceptance of the Bible and acceptance of modernity—is extremely complicated and requires a great deal of mental gymnastics to function. If we are to say, for example, that the Bible is “divinely inspired” but not “the literal word of God”, who is to say which parts of the Bible are correct and which are not? Homosexuality might be condemned by one believer in this methodology but condoned by another: whose decision is it? This method may work for some people, but it will not work for others: everybody will choose different things, based primarily—and this is key—upon what he or she wants to be true. If one person wants to permit homosexuality, he or she will rule that the bits of the Bible prohibiting homosexuality were the product of a different time and should therefore not be taken as true. But another person will assert that these parts are in fact divinely composed and are therefore binding. When individuals or communities make these judgments for themselves, the results are an arbitrary smorgasbord of what people wish the Bible said rather than what it does say.

But this isn’t the only way of attempting to find a “happy medium”. One of the tricks that is sometimes employed by people who wish to retain some sense of the Bible’s truth while themselves permitting homosexuality goes something like this. The verses in question use the phrase “in the manner of laying with a woman” to refer to the prohibited sexual act. The thinking goes: women have a vagina, men do not—therefore the act in question is totally different, and homosexual intercourse is not “in the manner of laying with a woman”. Again, while this kind of sophistry works for some people, there are two major problems with it. First, it’s painfully obvious what the verses actually mean, especially when taken in their context of lists of prohibited sexual relationships. Second, again, the efforts to find a “happy medium” reveal themselves to be completely arbitrary. They are reflections, as I have said, of what the individual making the judgments about the text wish it said rather than what it does say. All the wishing in the world won’t make the Bible not say that homosexuality is an immoral abomination.

Another way of dealing with the problem is to recommend celibacy: since the Bible only prohibits homosexual intercourse but not homosexual attraction, one may be homosexual as long as one does not have gay sex. The thinking goes that everybody has his or her own “crosses to bear”, as it were, and that a desire to engage in homosexual sex could be one of them. Some very influential people—including both gay and straight rabbis from various walks of Jewish life, including the Orthodox world—advocate this view, at least in part. Yet this position is a disaster. This punishment of dooming homosexuals to a life without any sex at all, which is mentally, spiritually, and physically oppressive. What an awful judgment to impose on human beings.

There is another way of dealing with this problem: homosexuals may be exempted from the requirement to follow the Biblical prohibition on homosexual intercourse because it would be an undue burden on them. In Jewish law, one may be exempted from an obligation on the grounds that it would be an undue burden. (This is how, incidentally, women are traditionally absolved of their obligations to follow positive time-bound commandments, such as daily prayer: it would be an undue burden for them to follow these regulations, since they’re supposedly too busy keeping house to pay attention to the proper times for prayer, etc.) Using this logic, homosexuals may be exempted from their requirements not to engage in homosexual intercourse because to forbid a human being from ever having sex constitutes an undue burden. This position is somewhat attractive because it recognizes that gay people are human beings too, and does not attempt to deprive them of their right to have sex. Yet its drawback is that it seems to view homosexuality as some kind of disability that entitles one to special dispensation to disobey the law of the Bible. While this approach does produce an inclusive effect, it reinforces the continual problem of second-class citizenship for homosexuals within the religious community.

There are many more ways of dealing with this problem; I won’t go into them all. (A good exploration of some of them, as well as a fuller explanation of the history behind the prohibition, can be found in Rabbi Steven Greenberg’s book Wrestling with God and Men, although I disagree with the conclusions put forward by this otherwise brave and forthright gay Orthodox rabbi.) But all these approaches to homosexuality boil down to one of the three positions I have outlined. Either you accept the Bible as the binding word of God, or you don’t, or you bend over backwards to try to make your own vision acceptable in terms of a millennia-old tradition that does not share your values or your vision of which things should be permissible.

And there is another problem on top of all of this. What if you have a religiously observant person who is a homosexual who wishes to remain religiously observant and be a participant in a religiously observant community, and yet transgress a law that the rest of that community views as binding? This problem is explored in the marvellous documentary Trembling Before G-d, and it has no real solution (besides celibacy and perpetual refusal to admit one’s homosexuality openly). The obvious question—why don’t these people join a denomination of Judaism that permits homosexuality?—is not even really a question to many of the people involved: they were raised Orthodox or Hasidic or some in some other kind of observant community, and that is where they wish to remain. Short of denomination-wide change in their religious communities, they will have to live in secret, in un-acceptance, in intolerance.

For Reform Judaism, which represents the largest number of American Jews, this has not really been a problem: since the Torah’s laws are not seen as legally binding, the prohibition on homosexuality can be safely ignored. And indeed, Reform Judaism (along with smaller liberal denominations like Reconstructionism and Renewal Judaism) is where gay and lesbian Jews thrived the best over the past few decades. For Orthodox Judaism (largely), this is also a non-issue: since the Torah’s laws are binding, homosexuality is regarded as illegal. However, there are a courageous few, like the aforementioned Rabbi Greenberg, who are openly gay and Orthodox—yet their numbers are small and the position they represent is not widely accepted at all within Orthodoxy. As for the middle-of-the-road Conservative Movement, it still maintains policies of some ambiguity: openly gay and lesbian rabbis are now ordained, but the decision of whether or not to perform gay marriages or commitment ceremonies, as well as decisions on what honours should be allowed to gay and lesbian Jews in the synagogue services, should be left up to individual rabbis and congregations. (Part of the reason for this ambiguity is the way the Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards is set up: any teshuvah, or religious responsum, that is officially adopted by the Committee becomes valid halachah, or Jewish law, within Conservative Judaism. Therefore, one teshuvah may be adopted permitting ordination of gay rabbis and another may be adopted forbidding it, and both are valid Conservative Judaism. Confused? So are many Conservative Jews.)

So there we have it. It’s still very much an open question as to how Judaism will regard its Jews who happen to be homosexuals, but what we have seen is that there is everywhere, at least, a framework for attacking this question. It will be interesting to see, as science continues to move ahead with the notion that homosexuality is not a “lifestyle choice” but an inborn characteristic and is therefore not “unnatural”, whether and how Judaism will be able to keep up.

(X-posted to Feministe.)

I would like to examine two things. First, what exactly are the sources for this doctrine, and how did this mistranslation arise in the first place? And second, how and why did it continue to perpetuate itself through the years, even though its foundation has been known to be questionable for a very long time?

Let’s attack the sources first. The original text is the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 (all translations are my own):

לָ֠כֵן יִתֵּ֨ן אֲדֹנָ֥י ה֛וּא לָכֶ֖ם א֑וֹת הִנֵּ֣ה הָֽעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙ וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן וְקָרָ֥את שְׁמ֖וֹ עִמָּ֥נוּ אֵֽל׃

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: behold, the young woman (‘almah) shall become pregnant and bear a son, and name him Immanuel.

Note that the Hebrew word ‘almah means “young woman” and does not imply anything about the sexual status of the person in question. However, this all changed when the language moved out of Hebrew. In the third century and later, the Bible was translated into Greek for the benefit of most Jews, who no longer spoke Hebrew. This translation was called the Septuagint (LXX for short), and its version of Isaiah 7:14 runs like this:

δία τοῦτο δώσει Κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον· ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ λήψεται, καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ.

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: behold, the virgin (parthenos) will conceive in the womb, and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel.

The Greek word parthenos means “virgin” specifically, and does not lack the ambiguity of the Hebrew word ‘almah. It is interesting to note that other Greek texts besides the LXX use the word νεᾶνις neanis, meaning “young woman” without any sexual connotations, but the parthenos reading came to dominate the textual tradition. This is obvious from looking at later translations, such as Jerome’s Latin Vulgate of the fourth century CE, which was translated directly out of the Hebrew but with a strong eye toward the previous textual tradition:

propter hoc dabit Dominus ipse vobis signum: ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitis nomen eius Emmanuhel.

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: behold, the virgin (virgo) will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel.

By the time of the writing of (at least) the Gospel of Matthew, the conceit that Mary was a virgin was already built in to the theology, and in fact was a necessary condition of that theology to make the prophecies of the Old Testament be brought to fulfilment by the events in the New Testament. The best example of this is Matthew 1:20–23:

ταῦτα δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐνθυμηθέντος ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου κατ’ ὄναρ ἐφάνη αὐτῷ λέγων, Ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς Δαυίδ, μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν Μαριὰμ τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου· τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν, αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν. τοῦτο δὲ ὅλον γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος, Ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον Μεθ’ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.

But when he had made up his mind to do this [i.e. not to marry Mary and send her away], a messenger from the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph son of David, do not fear taking Mary as your wife, for the child conceived within her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus for he will save the people from their sins.” This took place to fulfil the word of the Lord through His prophet: “Behold, the virgin will conceive in her womb and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.”

So there you have it. A seemingly innocuous substitution—parthenos for ‘almah, “virgin” for “young woman”—and we have, by the time of the codification of the New Testament, a doctrine that Jesus was conceived of Mary, a virgin, via the Holy Spirit. Errors of textual transmission have been supplemented by theology to create a chimera of a whole different sort.

(The astute reader will have noticed that I did not attempt to deal with all the other transmission problems in this text, notably the identity and number of those doing the naming, and the exact phrasing for “conceive”. I am content to leave the tracking of and wrangling over these things as an exercise for the reader.)

Let me turn now (briefly, I promise) to my second question: why is this doctrine still around, and how does it keep itself going? The answer, as I alluded to above, is that it is essentially indestructible. Like the alien in Alien or the myth about Eskimo words for snow, once the “virgin” mistranslation was loose in the wild, there was no stopping it. And indeed, slaying this chimera is now all but impossible, since there have been so many layers of theological edifice constructed on top of it in the two thousand or so years since it first got its start. Right or wrong, this doctrine is here to stay.

Also, I suspect that a long undercurrent of anti-translationism in many parts of the Western world, which regarded the Vulgate as the only authoritative Bible for centuries and were responsible for the burning at the stake of anyone who owned or produced a translated Bible is partially responsible as well. Currently, this belief seems to take the form of an antipathy toward textual criticism in general, which has as its root the assumption that the Bible is a human document, produced by humans, and susceptible to human error. This is especially evident in the King James Only movement, but more generally in those who argue that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. We simply cannot begin to understand these issues unless you accept that the text of the Bible has changed over the centuries, as it has been passed through different hands and been translated into different languages.

“You may ask,” Tevye the dairyman once noted, “how do these traditions get started? I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But it’s a tradition.” Although Tevye didn’t believe in the virgin birth, and we do know how the tradition behind this doctrine got started, his larger point remains valid: it’s a tradition, and regardless of how unfounded or silly they are, traditions oftentimes take on lives all their own.

(X-posted to Feministe.)

This phenomenon is, of course, well-attested and recognized. Think of the game “Telephone” (or “Chinese Whispers” or “Russian Scandal”, depending on your upbringing and/or loyalties): one person says something to another, then it is repeated to the next person, and so on down the line until it has morphed into something quite different and possibly unrecognizable from its original form. This sort of thing happens all the time in the world of textual transmission—Greek tragedies, for example, are excellent places to see medieval monks’ copying abilities really go to town on a text—and there is a highly specialized (black) art to piecing together all the different evidence from all the different versions in circulation to try to determine which reading is the closest to the original text.

The Bible, of course, has been subject to some really terrible textual transmission problems over the centuries. If you’re interested in this on a scale larger than the small examples I plan to deal with in this essay, check out Bart Ehrman’s excellent book Misquoting Jesus. But for the moment, allow me to illustrate with a trivial example, and please bear with me—I promise this does get interesting: Psalm 145, which is recited as part of the traditional Jewish liturgy three times daily. The psalm is an alphabetic acrostic, having one verse beginning which each letter of the alphabet. However, one letter—nun—appears to be missing: the psalm skips right from mem to samekh.

Why is there no verse for the letter nun? The traditional Jewish answers are completely full of nonsense. For example, one traditional explanation is that nun stands for all kinds of bad things, like n’filah—”downfall”—so the Psalmist avoided the letter the letter to avoid referring to the possibility of the people Israel’s future downfall. Never mind the fact that every other acrostic uses the letter nun, such as Psalm 34 or the first four chapters of the Book of Lamentations.

In fact, the explanation is much simpler. Our oldest manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, on which the Hebrew text of the Bible is based, are only as recent as the eleventh century CE. If you look further back in history, you find older texts—the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as ancient translations of the Bible into Greek and Syriac—and do you know what? All of these texts have a line corresponding to the letter nun. Only the comparatively recent Masoretic Text does not.

What conclusion can we draw? The simplest explanation is that somewhere between antiquity and the eleventh century, a scribe skipped the nun verse while copying out Psalm 145, and his version ended up being codified as the basis for all future texts. Later, many silly arguments were developed by overzealous exegetes to explain this “absence” of a verse. But in reality the verse has been there all the time, just not in the one text considered to be “authoritative”.

It’s this kind of bullshit that leads to the silencing of voices—and sometimes those voices are women’s voices, or at least feminine voices.

One of my favourite Hebrew poems is Yedid Nefesh, composed by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Eliezer Azikri. The poem is a love song between a lover and God—but the God character in the poem is often spoken of in the feminine. It is very difficult to translate the poem into English, which does not make gender distinctions in its second-person pronouns, and retain the ambiguity present in the extremely dense Hebrew. But the fact remains that the God of Yedid Nefesh is in some respects feminine and in some respects masculine.

Since it was written, Yedid Nefesh has been copied and recopied so many times that whole lines now bear no resemblance to the way they were originally written. This is ridiculous because the manuscript version—in the author’s own handwriting—still exists. Yet the versions of this poem that circulate in the Jewish liturgical world bear very little resemblance to the work of striking beauty—and gender ambiguity—that was what the author originally wrote. The conception of the character of God has become much less fluid; all the pronouns have been turned into masculine pronouns, and the poem now presents a much less “threatening” image of God for the traditional Jew.

Whether what has happened has been a deliberate masculinizing of a feminine voice or simply the vicissitudes of history taking their toll on this poem is irrelevant: this God has been masculinized either way. Since it doesn’t jive with traditional Jewish notions of God’s masculinity, it is heretical and wrong. Even though the original text the way Charlie actually wrote it still exists, only a scant few prayer books print the true text. Bad textual transmission has meant that a feminine voice, a feminine conception of God, has been silenced.

So what are we to do about this? Do we sing the Yedid Nefesh the way the author wrote it, or do we sing the “traditional” and corrupted version? Do we put the nun verse back into the Hebrew text of Psalm 145, or do we leave it out? My mind isn’t quite made up, and I’d like to throw this topic open for debate (that is, if anyone’s had the fortitude to stick with me this far into the essay): At what point—if any—should we restore the original version of a text to a liturgy? My own feeling is that, as for Psalm 145, the nun verse should stay out, since that’s how it’s been recited for a thousand years and this tradition has developed a life of its own. Yet as for the feminine God of Yedid Nefesh, I think that the textual corruption has become so bad and so destructive that more drastic measures should be taken—like restoring the poem to the way it was actually written. Not only would this restore the text to its original form, but it would restore an arresting and challenging conception of a God who is both masculine and feminine into a world where such conceptions of God are sorely lacking.

(X-posted to Feministe.)

We begin in Rome, where the famous Capitoline Wolf has been found to have been made in the medieval period: specifically, in the 13th century CE, not in the 5th century BCE. The twins Romulus and Remus, suckling underneath, were added later, probably in the 15th century CE. This statue was long thought to have been ancient–Pliny the Elder writes of it, and Cicero mentions a statue of a wolf twice (De div. 1.20 and 2.47) among the objects damaged by a lightning strike in 65 BCE–but there have been doubts about the statue’s authenticity since at least the 17th century. These questions have now been put to rest by radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating, which establish the 13th century date. Furthermore, the casting method by which the wolf was constructed was not developed until the 12th century anyway. This news will come as quite a disappointment to those of us who were taught from an early age to view the statue as the exemplification of The Grandeur That Was Rome, but it’s still an impressive and beautiful piece of art nonetheless.

Next on our travelogues, we come to Greece, but let’s stay on the topic of non-ancient artifacts–or at least possible hoaxes. The Phaistos Disc has remained an indecipherable artifact of Minoan Greece since its discovery in the early 20th century. Its pictograms, unrelated to anything else in the world, may represent some sort of form of Greek, or they may not–nobody has been able to figure them out yet. But there’s a new theory that states that the disc might be a hoax, a fake created by one of the archaeologists who excavated the site. There are, apparently, problems with the way the clay was fired and the way the impressions were made on its surface, and of course it hasn’t been deciphered yet. My prediction: debate on this issue is not likely to cease any time soon.

Finally, also from the Greek Islands, there have been new developments in understanding the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient analog calculation device that is (by some definitions) the world’s oldest computer. This device was built sometime between 140 and 100 BCE and was recovered a hundred years ago in a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, but until recently nobody really had much of an idea what it was for or how it worked. The mechanism possesses a complex series of gears and wheels which calculated dates of solar eclipses and, according to new evidence, the calendar according to the four-year Olympiad cycle. X-ray tomography and other advanced imaging techniques have revealed lengthy inscriptions in Greek on the device, but the calendar in use was the Egyptian one, and it shows evidence of having been altered after its construction. Thus, this device, according to Paul Fenwick’s masterful talk “An Illustrated History of Failure” given at OSCON 2008, is the world’s earliest examples of software collaboration, code modification, and feature creep.

This concludes our whirlwind tour through the recent awesomeness of ancient history and archaeology. Stay tuned for future instalments!

Via TPM/Veracifier and Think Progress.