Exodus 20:9 - On the addressee

(The above rendering and footnote—incorporating a proposed correction for late 2024—come from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation.)

The Decalogue is addressed grammatically in the second-person masculine singular, and referentially not to a specific party but rather “to whom it may concern.” Although some scholars have claimed that such a formulation excludes women, that view does not withstand scrutiny—at least not with regard to the text’s plain sense.

Rather, by its very nature, Biblical Hebrew implicitly includes women when the addressee is nonspecific; this is demonstrated by biblical narratives in which the characters confirm such inclusion by their words and actions (Stein 2008; Stein 2013). Thus women are in view by default unless the topic under discussion is restricted to men by convention, or if such a restriction is explicitly stated. (On the linguistic convention for non-specific second-person address, see page 10 of “Notes on Gender in Translation.”)

Conceptually speaking, the Decalogue is couched in terms of a household, for that was the basic social and economic unit in the Israelite world. The legal provisions are thus addressed to the responsible party within such households.

Typically, the responsible party was the (male) head of the household—but not only him. To the text’s audience, it would have gone without saying that his wife was part of a household’s management team. She had major responsibility as a manager and trainer. As Carol Meyers writes: “In the complex, multi-generational Israelite households,… women controlled most internal household activities.… A senior woman would have had some authority over male servitors as well as over children” (“Women in Ancient Israel—An Overview,” in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, 2008, pp. xlv–xlvi).

This state of affairs explains why in verse 10’s list of household roles (“you, your son or daughter,” etc.), the wife is conspicuous by her absence. As the late Tikva Frymer-Kensky wrote with regard to the parallel verse, Deut 5:14, “the omission of a phrase ‘and your wife’ shows that the ‘you’ that the law addresses includes both women and men, each treated as a separate moral agent” (“Deuteronomy,” Women’s Bible Commentary, 1998, p. 59).

Ironically, the absence of the wife’s mention in this verse pointedly signals that the “masculine” pronoun אַתָּה is meant to include her. Similar constructions and situations appear in Num 18:11 and Deut 12:12, 18.