A Rabbi Claims That God Is Transgender

Michael Brown

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Posted: Aug 15, 2016 12:01 AM

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In an August 12th op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “Is God Transgender?,” Rabbi Mark Sameth claims that “the Hebrew Bible, when read in its original language, offers ‘a highly elastic view of gender’” and that, “Counter to everything we grew up believing, the God of Israel — the God of the three monotheistic, Abrahamic religions to which fully half the people on the planet today belong — was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered deity.”

Are there any truths to these claims?

Certainly not.

For Rabbi Sameth, these are issues of social concern and not merely theological abstractions, as he states explicitly at the outset of his article: “I’m a rabbi, and so I’m particularly saddened whenever religious arguments are brought in to defend social prejudices — as they often are in the discussion about transgender rights.”

The real question, though, for Jews and Christians who look to the Hebrew Scriptures as God’s Word is very simple: What do the Scriptures teach? What is the explicit testimony of the Bible?

Had Rabbi Sameth simply stated that God transcends gender, I would have no argument.

Had he only said that when God created human beings He created them male and female, indicating that the fullness of the meaning of both male and female is to be found in God, I would have concurred.

And had Rabbi Sameth pointed out that there are aspects of motherly care attributed to God in the Scriptures (see, for example Isaiah 49:15), I would also have concurred. (Note that rabbinic teaching about the Shechinah emphasizes the motherly aspects of God).

But what the rabbi argues for is much more than this, and since he is making these arguments with social implications, it is important that we respond with clarity.

Rabbi Sameth claims that, “The four-Hebrew-letter name of God, which scholars refer to as the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, was probably not pronounced ‘Jehovah’ or ‘Yahweh,’ as some have guessed. The Israelite priests would have read the letters in reverse as Hu/Hi — in other words, the hidden name of God was Hebrew for ‘He/She.’”

There is not a stitch of evidence to support this – and I mean not a stitch. Nowhere do we read in any ancient biblical text that the divine name was read backwards by priests (you might as well argue that readers of this article read my name backwards). This is not suggested in any authoritative writing, and there is zero evidence that YHWH was ever taken to mean “He/She.” 

The argument is utterly preposterous, and I write this with all respect to the many years of study that Rabbi Sameth has put into this subject. Perhaps he is reading his ideas into the biblical text?