The New York Times on Saturday gave Rabbi Mark Sameth a platform to boost his radical interpretation of Hebrew scripture — that the God of Abraham is a "He/She," and that many in the ancient world practiced "gender fluidity." Sameth rehashed his eight-year-old theory that "counter to everything we grew up believing, the God of Israel...was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered deity." He also claimed that "the Hebrew Bible, when read in its original language, offers a highly elastic view of gender," and contended that Adam, Eve, and other biblical figures had "well-expressed gender fluidity."
The rabbi led his op-ed piece, "Is God Transgender?," by revealing that about four decades ago, "a cousin of mine...became one of the first people in America to undergo sex-reassignment surgery...Paul Monroe Grossman...had been a beloved music teacher in New Jersey. She was fired after her surgery, and she subsequently lost her lawsuit for wrongful termination based on sex discrimination." He soon added that "for the first time it is possible to imagine a ruling from a fully seated Supreme Court to comprehensively outlaw discrimination against transgender people. There is real reason to be hopeful, even if social prejudices don't disappear overnight."
Sameth set up his eyebrow-raising claims about God and major biblical figures by divulging that as a rabbi, he's "particularly saddened whenever religious arguments are brought in to defend social prejudices — as they often are in the discussion about transgender rights." He continued with his "highly elastic view of gender" claim about the Hebrew Scriptures:
...In fact, the Hebrew Bible, when read in its original language, offers a highly elastic view of gender. And I do mean highly elastic: In Genesis 3:12, Eve is referred to as 'he.' In Genesis 9:21, after the flood, Noah repairs to "her" tent. Genesis 24:16 refers to Rebecca as a "young man." And Genesis 1:27 refers to Adam as "them."
Surprising, I know. And there are many other, even more vivid examples: In Esther 2:7, Mordecai is pictured as nursing his niece Esther. In a similar way, in Isaiah 49:23, the future kings of Israel are prophesied to be "nursing kings."
The rabbi claimed that "these aren't typos. In the ancient world, well-expressed gender fluidity was the mark of a civilized person." He cited the neighboring cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt, where "the gods were thought of as gender-fluid, and human beings were considered reflections of the gods." He continued with his radical theory about the God of Abraham, which he first proposed in a 2008 article in the CCAR [Central Conference of American Rabbis] Journal:
The Israelites took the transgender trope from their surrounding cultures and wove it into their own sacred scripture. 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." 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.
Of course, there's a major problem with this scriptural interpretation. The ancient Hebrews always found themselves in major trouble with God when they took up the traditions of their neighbors. During the Exodus out of Egypt, when the Hebrews made the golden idol, only the plea of Moses prevented God from destroying His chosen people. God later sent Jeremiah to warn the Hebrews that they were going to be punished for having "forsaken me, and served a strange god in your own land." Not long after this prophecy, the children of Israel were taken in captivity to Babylon.
Therefore, it is a major stretch on Sameth's part to not only claim that the ancient Jews adopted their neighbors' "transgender trope" about God, but to hint that they had no problem with the "gender fluidity" of these neighboring peoples. Just a cursory examination of Leviticus and Deuteronomy would cast cold water on that theory.
The rabbi later touted that "it may come as a surprise that scientists view gender as anything other than a simple binary. But thousands of years ago, as a review of ancient literature makes clear, that truth was known." He concluded by likening gender to the music that his cousin once taught: "Gender, as Cousin Paula might have put it, is more like music: Each of us has a key and a range with which we are most comfortable. Attuned to ourselves and to one another, we can find happiness and harmony."
