Thought on gender and God language

If all people, male and female, are made in the image of God—or rather, to put the matter correctly, if humanity collectively, including male and female together, is made in the image of God—then why does the Bible use male language and primarily (though not exclusively) male imagery for God? It’s a fair question, and there are reasons for it—none of which is that God is male. That one is yet another self-interested idolatrous distortion of the biblical text (which, like most such, eventually came back around to bite the folks who pushed it, or at least their heirs).

Indeed, it should be stated quite clearly that the use of masculine pronouns does not mean and is not intended to mean that God is male. That particular confusion doesn’t belong to the original Hebrew but is a product of our largely degendered English language; in Hebrew, which is like every other ancient language in that every word has a gender, where the words “wind” and “brick” and “meat” are all feminine while the words “cook” and “valley” and “mouse” are masculine—where the word “king” is of course masculine, but the word “kingdom” is feminine—the fact that the words for “God” are masculine wouldn’t necessarily be taken as limiting God by gender. To the best of my knowledge, that false interpretation is much more recent than the Hebrew Scriptures.

It’s not enough, though, to say that this is merely grammatical; there were in fact theological reasons for using masculine language for God—and no, they didn’t have anything to do with any sort of supposed male superiority. Rather, they had to do with differentiating the worship of Yahweh God of Israel from the religions of the surrounding nations.

For one thing, in those religions, as in their modern descendants, where a goddess was worshiped as creator, the process of creation was envisioned as the goddess giving birth to the world—meaning the world is made of the same stuff as the deity, and thus is partly divine itself. Genesis rules that out: God speaks, and creation happens, outside himself—he is Father of creation, not its mother. For another, as anyone who has read The DaVinci Code knows, goddess-worship among Israel’s neighbors involved ritual sex, as it also usually does today; this is nothing God would ever tolerate among his people, and especially not in the form it took then, where the temples basically had female slaves to serve as sacred prostitutes.

In both these respects, the relationship between God and his creation—and consequently, the worship he desires from his creation—differs dramatically from the pagan conception; and so there is the need for different language to portray that, to limn a different picture of that relationship than the one the pagans held. The purpose of masculine God-language isn’t to define or delimit our picture of God; it is, like most biblical language about God, more illustrative and suggestive than definitive. But it is also, like all biblical language, the language God has chosen, because the boundaries it sets are necessary.