On the male gender in Genesis 2:7

(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew text.)

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Feminist scholars disagree over whether this first human being is to be construed as gendered (i.e., as manly or male). Some, such as Phyllis Trible and Mieke Bal, have argued that the first human is generic until sexual differentiation takes place. In contrast, many (including gender-sensitive translations such as the NRSV and TNIV, as well as David Jobling, D. N. Fewell, David Gunn, Susan Lanser, and Gail Yee) have viewed the term as consistently male throughout the passage. I agree with the latter, on the grounds that the Tanakh throughout evidently expects readers to infer a referent’s social gender from the formal and topical context—in other words, in the usual way that human beings process language communication. And neither the social convention nor the linguistic and contextual clues support a non-gendered construal of this first human being, as a matter of the text’s plain sense.

Social convention is a decisive context for interpretation, because it goes without saying and provides the default construal. In this case, the relevant convention for the original audience is that they viewed both personal genealogy and larger societal relationships in patrilineal terms. They considered as natural a social organization that was headed by men at all levels. Consequently, such an audience would have expected a story about the origin of genealogical lineage—that is, about the first human being—to be about a male. This presumption expresses not a biological truth about humankind but rather a social one.

Furthermore, this understanding of the first human as gendered proceeds to yield the most coherent and informative text, which subsequently confirms the gendering already at this point. It explains numerous aspects of the narrative as it continues:

• why this is the only biblical passage in which the label הָאָדָם refers to a particular individual in the presence of another individual;
• why Adam is never formally named (for his designation already corresponds functionally to the naming of the first woman in 3:20 as אֵם כׇּל־חָי “progenitress”);
• why he continues to be referred to as הָאָדָם even after he is referred to by his name, אָדָם, in 3:17; and
• why he is referred to as הָאָדָם even before his mate is subordinated to him.

The person labeled הָאָדָם must be male by 2:22b. (The subsequent verses imply that sex/gender differentiation has occurred by that point; and the newly created woman is described as “his woman” in 2:25, 3:20, and 4:1.) Yet the language prior to 2:22b is matter-of-fact and gives no signal of discontinuity or word play to indicate that the character labeled הָאָדָם has suddenly become gendered. This state of affairs confirms that he must have been gendered all along.

Indeed, if that figure had been an undifferentiated human being prior to 2:22b, the continuity of lexical meaning would be violated at that point—reducing the overall coherence of the text. Furthermore, in terms of the plain sense of the passage, the term הָאָדָם must be labeling a dramatis persona, a consistent character. (That is, unless otherwise noted—but as stated above, no such notice is given.) This is a matter of narrative coherence.

In 1996, Reuven Kimelman (“The Seduction of Eve,” n. 30) objected to the construal of a presupposed maleness, by citing historical counterexamples: “that any ancient reader coming from an androcentric culture would just assume the primacy of the male is belied by the fact that already in late antiquity הָאָדָם was often referred to androgynously as male and female”; further, he adds, in the Sumerian creation story known commonly as “The Birth of Man,” there appeared a figure labeled as “man-in-the-body-of-which-no-male-and-no-female-organ-was-placed”. Yet this evidence is not persuasive. In the first case, the cited interpreters were consciously making midrash and not purporting to present the text’s plain sense. And in the second case, the text’s going out of its way to indicate that the human in question was not sexed actually supports the reliability of the audience’s presumption of gender that Kimelman argues against.

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As for rendering into English, the NJPS ‘his’ (like subsequent pronouns) matches the construal arrived at above. There is no warrant to depart from the NJPS pronouns.