With Barry L. Schwartz
Reprinted with permission from CCAR Journal
The Reform Jewish Quarterly
Fall 2023
What does it mean to sing a new song with ancient words? As rabbis, we are called to connect ourselves and others to God. The language we use is part of this endeavor, in the way we translate sacred text and in the way we pray. When our language narrows the path of connection rather than widens it, there is a problem.
The English language has changed dramatically in the past decades, and nowhere is this more apparent than regarding gender. For example, according to both the Chicago Manual of Style—and to our bar/bat/bet mitzvah students—he is no longer accepted in formal writing as a generic pronoun, and mankind is no longer
accepted as a universal noun. In many if not most cases we accept and agree with this move toward gender-neutral language.
Journal readers know that Reform liturgy already uses gender-neutral language, allowing us to break free of the overwhelmingly male images we consciously or unconsciously project onto the God of Israel. Doing this encourages us to imagine a Deity who may be beyond gender or inclusive of all genders. Such language helps us
to present God without personification, without form, and without idolatry, in fulfillment of the second commandment. The Reform Movement has also been reading and studying the Five Books of Moses with gender-neutral God language since 2005 when The Torah: A Modern Commentary was first published (and reprinted in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary). However, up until now, English-language translations of Nevi’im and Ketuvim uniformly refer to the Deity as He, among a host of other masculine designations. There simply have not been any other English-language options for NaKH, until now.
With this in mind, the Jewish Publication Society has just published THE JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition (RJPS)—a revised translation of the full JPS TANAKH for today’s readers. As director of JPS and literary editor of the translation team respectively, we had a front row seat to this endeavor. JPS has striven to combine the highest levels of scholarship and accessible style while reflecting many of the gender-related and other English-language changes that have taken place in our contemporary culture in recent years. In a unique partnership, The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition is being published in digital format on Sefaria and as a print book.
The first JPS translation (OJPS: 1917), a predominantly word-for-word translation of the Hebrew that was strongly influenced by the English style of the King James Version, served as the standard translation of the American Jewish community for a half century. The next translation, a three-decade endeavor (NJPS: 1985), was a
more idiomatic rendering, faithful to the nuances of the Hebrew and guided by centuries of Jewish exegesis as well as by the most current Bible scholarship. NJPS also employed more modern language than OJPS did; among the most prominent examples was the change of Thou (in direct address to God) to You.
This new edition is best described as an adaptation of NJPS. Created at the behest of Rabbi Barry Schwartz and the trustees of JPS,the translation was thoroughly revised by a multidenominational, multidisciplinary team led by Rabbi David E. S. Stein, PhD (project manager and revising translator), Rabbi Beth Lieberman (literary editor and revising translator), Job Y. Jindo, PhD (revising translator for Nevi’im and Ketuvim), and Hilary Lipka, PhD (academic consulting editor). The team took as its model the revising principles of The JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, and applied gender-related guidelines developed by The Contemporary Torah (JPS, 2006) to adapt the English-language text for every book of the Hebrew Bible.
RJPS presents the most up-to-date scholarship, incorporating five decades of new research into Israelite society and religion, literary studies, philology, linguistics, and the social sciences. Gender-neutral renderings where appropriate and gendered ones where called for result in a faithful and accurate translation. At the same time, RJPS strives for inclusive language when referring broadly to people, ancestors, and humankind. In reference to God, RJPS examines every context to arrive at the most appropriate rendering, generally avoiding grammatically masculine pronouns and labels widely construed as ascribing gender (although a gendered term may express a gendered metaphor). To enable the Tetragrammaton to be experienced as a name and without masculine connotations, it is typically rendered as God (in small capitals) rather than “the Lord” (as in NJPS).
To reveal the entirety of what has been changed in this new edition would require its own book (the preface, available online at purl.org/jps/rjps-preface, explains the translation’s the scope and methodology). After all, every mention of God and every mention of people in the entire Bible was reviewed! Thousands of citations were analyzed, one by one, to determine the most gender accurate translation in terms of the Hebrew’s original intent and the contemporary understanding of today’s English-language readers.
Here is a brief sampling of some representative revisions.
The representation of God’s name, יהוה:
NJPS: Lord
RJPS: God
The representation of יהוה אלהיך:
NJPS: the Lord your God
RJPS: the Eternal your God
Avoiding the use of gendered singular pronouns for the Deity and universal masculine nouns for people:
Joshua 22:5
NJPS: . . . be very careful to fulfill the Instruction and the Teaching that Moses the servant of the Lord enjoined upon you, to love the Lord your God and to walk in all His ways, and to keep His commandments and hold fast to Him, and to serve Him with all your heart and soul.
RJPS: . . . be very careful to fulfill the Instruction and the Teaching that Moses the servant of God enjoined upon you, to love the Eternal your God and to walk in all [God’s] ways and keep the commandments; it is [God] to whom you should hold fast, and render service to with all your heart and soul.
Isaiah 6:1–3
NJPS: In the year that King Uzziah died, I beheld my Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; and the skirts of His robe filled the Temple. Seraphs stood in attendance on Him. Each of them had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his legs, and with two he would fly. And one would call to the other,“Holy, holy, holy!
The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!”
RJPS: In the year that King Uzziah died, I beheld my Sovereign seated on a high and lofty throne; and the skirts of God’s robe filled the Temple. Seraphs stood in attendance, each with six wings – two covering the face, two covering the body, and two to fly with. And one would call to the other “Holy, holy, holy! god of Hosts Whose presence fills all the earth!”
Psalms 8:5-6
NJPS: what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him, that You have made him little less than divine, and adorned him with glory and majesty;
RJPS: what are human beings that You have been mindful of them, mortals that You have taken note of them, that You have made them little less than divine, and adorned them with glory and majesty?
We are grateful for the opportunity to have worked on this project with the goal of making the sacred text more inclusive, more accessible, and closer to the reader and to the worshiper than ever before. We also hope it will save our colleagues – clergy and educators alike – valuable time retranslating the text so as to convey an inclusive perspective.
And perhaps most importantly, we believe that in this holy work of translating the Tanakh and singing to God a new song (Psalm 96:1), we have been faithful to our ancestors even as we have been responsible to our children.