וְאִם־אֵ֣ין אַחִים֮ לְאָבִיו֒ וּנְתַתֶּ֣ם אֶת־נַחֲלָת֗וֹ לִשְׁאֵר֞וֹ הַקָּרֹ֥ב אֵלָ֛יו מִמִּשְׁפַּחְתּ֖וֹ וְיָרַ֣שׁ אֹתָ֑הּ וְֽהָ֨יְתָ֜ה לִבְנֵ֤י יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ לְחֻקַּ֣ת מִשְׁפָּ֔ט כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר צִוָּ֥ה יְהֹוָ֖ה אֶת־מֹשֶֽׁה׃
If his father had no brothers, you shall assign his property to his nearest relative in his own clan, who shall inherit it.’ This shall be the law of procedure for the Israelites, in accordance with GOD’s command to Moses.”
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation.)
In this discussion of the inheritance of a landholding, a key term is שְׁאֵר, literally “flesh,” as denoting extended family. The term is thus used in an extended sense, much like the English expression “blood relative.” (So Jacob Milgrom in the JPS Torah Commentary series, ad loc.) It is invoked similarly in discussing the redemption of landholdings (Lev 25:49).
Elsewhere, this term includes one’s mother and daughter (Lev 21:2, in the context of a priest’s physical contact with the corpse of a relative), and it includes one’s sister and granddaughter (Lev 18:13, 17, in the context of sexual mores). Hence the term, when used in a referring expression, is not itself gender-restricted in its scope. (So Baruch Levine, Anchor Bible commentary at Num 5:8.)
This grammatically masculine noun is employed here to refer to a category of persons, and thus so does the consequent verb וְיָרַ֣שׁ whose inflection is likewise grammatically masculine; this means that the referent’s social gender is not grammatically specified (except for not being solely womanly, which is a trivial restriction in this case).
Nor is gender restricted by the topic. One might posit that only men are in view, to ensure that the land would remain within the same clan (so Milgrom; see Num 36:1–12). Yet surely some means would have been found to likewise keep a woman’s land within the clan’s control. The Shunammite woman owns land among her kinfolk, and nobody seems concerned about that fact (2 Kgs 8:3, 6; 4:13; see Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible [Schocken, 2002], 71–73). And as Zafrira Ben-Barak has noted, “one of the most strictly observed social principles in the ancient Near East was the preservation of the family patrimony” (Ben-Barak, “Inheritance by Daughters in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of Semitic Studies 25.1 (1980): 22–33,” here 22; see also her “Mutual Influences in the Ancient Near East: Inheritance as a Case in Point,” in Mutual Influences of Peoples and Cultures in the Ancient Near East, 1996, 1–15, here 8).
In short, we lack definitive evidence that the text’s composer(s) could rely upon the ancient Israelite audience to have inferred that women are surely excluded from view. Thus we have no warrant for rendering in gendered terms.
Regarding translation, the NJPS rendering “and he shall inherit” is nowadays construed as referring only to men. Because that is an unwarranted gender restriction, the revised rendering is gender-inclusive.