Gender and Translation

"… They pioneer a characteristic feature of Syrian Christianity, reference to the Holy Spirit as female. Grammatically, after all, ruha, the Syriac word for spirit, is feminine, although later Christians found this disconcerting and from around 400 CE arbitrarily redefined the word as masculine in grammatical gender."

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Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 183

People who like to define God as male are pretty good at creating silly reasons for doing so, when in fact, much of the gender derivation we find in modern Bible translations comes from the grammatical gender of words in the languages of the texts.  People do this with the Bible, yet if we were going to argue that because the word for “book” in Spanish is masculine, that all books are male in nature and then derive qualitative meaning about knowledge being masculine, people would think we were ridiculous... because the grammatical gender of words is about grammar, not about values.

Genders of words are meaningful only when we want them to be.  No one thinks there is meaning in the gender of the word “backpack” or “toothbrush,” but when it's God, it seems to matter a lot more.

That being said, when a word for God or Spirit is feminine, plural, or some other “way” that is against preconceptions about God (these things totally happen in the original Bible languages, guys), the Church has no problem arbitrarily redefining things to meet its own needs for patriarchy, just as it had no problem shutting women out of ministerial positions once the church started becoming more mainstream... because after all, in order for a faith to be socially acceptable, it must more or less adhere to the social values of the time.

…and then the Church loses the radically inclusive Jesus that turned up the tables of institutional religion and its tendency toward legalism and turns its back on the spiritual gifts of women.  At the very core of my being, I feel Jesus would be deeply bothered by how religious institutions have denied the spiritual gifts of women by restricting women to particular roles in society and family.