Milk and Honey

Rabbi of Congregation Berith Sholom in Troy, NY

Sun and Moon and gender


Fascinating bit of research on NPR just now:  The linguistic gender of nouns strongly affects how people perceive and describe the world.  E.g. “bridge” is feminine in German, and German speakers randomly described bridges as “pretty, fragile,” etc.  But it’s masculine in Spanish, and Spanish speakers described bridges as “thrilling, strong,” etc.  Even English-only speakers who were taught a made-up gendered language for just one day showed the same effect.

There are two words for “sun” in Hebrew.  The familiar one, shemesh שמש , is very old; it’s the word that’s used in Genesis, and it’s a masculine noun.  A lot of people have been asking me why the once-every-28-years Sun Blessing we recite this Wednesday (if the sun peeks out!) is called Birkat haChammah ברכת החמה instead of Birkat haShemesh ברכת השמש. Chammah חמה is a poetic name for the sun, a feminine noun which is not as old as shemesh שמש; I think it shows up first in Rabbinic literature, though it could be be as early as later in the Bible.  (Don’t have time to do a full text search for you right now.)  Chammah חמה comes from cham חם, which means “hot.”

What my questioners probably know, but have forgotten, is that there are also two Hebrew words for “moon.”  The old one that shows up in Genesis is yareyach ירח, related to the word yerach ירח which means “month.”  Makes sense, for a people whose months are lunar.  The more poetic and later name is l’vanah לבנה, from lavan לבן which means “white.”  Yareyach ירח is masculine, l’vanah לבנה is feminine.

So our tradition sees elements of traditional masculinity and traditional femininity in both the sun and the moon; and it’s not that they switched places, but both were seen as “masculine” earlier and both “feminine” later.  And the question that I have behind all of this is, why are these stereotypical gender traits so strongly ingrained in us humans, when there are so many examples to the contrary?

Debora S. Gordon

4 Responses

  1. Rabbi Don Cashman says:

    Deb -
    Let me raise with you the concept of dual gender (bisexuality?) of certain nouns in Biblical Hebrew, especially in the class called segolate nouns. שמש, ארח, and דרך seem to appear as both. Let’s stick with shemesh/sun, which helps make your point.
    Most of the time it is masculine, but for example in II Sam 2:24, II K 3:22, Ps 104:22, Micah 3:6 it takes a feminine verb.
    In a more modern context, Naomi Shemer used the phrase, in Yerushalyim shel Zahav: אלפי שמשות זורחות/”A thousand suns shine,” using both a feminine plural and a feminine verb.

    BTW Hammah/sun appears 6 times in the Bible in poetic contexts. Shemesh is by far the common term, with over 130 occurrences. [Mandelkern: Don't leave home without it].


  2. Jeff Gordon says:

    Perhaps because the genders are so different. Occam’s Razor usually prevails. Let me cite an example. My wife and I were recently driving past a local pond where there were a number of dogwalkers. We observed one idiot appearing to mistreat his dog. We both spoke out simultaneously. She expressed sympathy for the dog, I announced my intention to turn around and teach the dude a lesson. Men and women are very different.

  3. Mom says:

    I think perhaps the changes in the Hebrew gender of vocabulary may have a connection to the eras in which the words were conceived, and the needs of that time, whether political or social.

    And think about it: women and men are constructed of all the same materials, just put together differently. That affects everything.

  4. I agree that the genders are different — ON AVERAGE. At the least we can thank the estrogen and testosterone our brains are bathed in at various time for that. But there are so many exceptions to the gender “rules” in humans’ behavior! Yet we tend to speak in broad generalities. That, at least, most of us seem to be wired to do!