Feminine Images of God jwa.org /encyclopedia/article/feminine-images-of-god by Yehudah Mirsky The myriad ways in which God and divinity have been thought, uttered, imagined, depicted and expressed in Jewish tradition resist easy characterization. Judaism’s radical monotheism is a standing challenge to human sensibilities, which rely so heavily on metaphors and sensual representations to make sense of our selves and of our world. Ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” are of course stereotypical, though like many stereotypes they can at times convey some rough social truths and correspond to some historical realities. In the case of Jewish thought, grammar at times meets theology inasmuch as impersonal Hebrew nouns are gendered, so that words like hokhmah, wisdom, and shekhinah, presence, over time lent themselves by virtue of their feminine (-ah) endings and in context with theological and other developments to more explicitly gendered meanings. The Hebrew Bible rejects the Near Eastern pantheon of gods and their female consorts in favor of one God, creator of all humanity, male and female alike, who enters into an intense covenantal relationship with the Children of Israel, regularly depicted as a marriage, with God as husband and Israel as wife (most vividly in Hosea). The male and female attributes ascribed by Near Eastern religions to gods and goddesses are incorporated as one into the Biblical God. Thus while the God of the Old Testament is, famously, a king and ruler and “a man of war” (Ex. 15:3), He “loves the stranger whom He provides with food and clothing” (Deut. 10:18). More to the point, the intercessions of Abraham, Moses and Samuel, invoking God’s mercies against His judgment, and the oracles of the classical prophets themselves, point to a tension within God between exacting justice and forgiving mercy. God is sometimes, though rarely, described in explicitly maternal terms, as in Is. 46:3–4. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom, God’s first creation and the guiding spirit of the world, is personified as woman, and indeed the “woman of valor” celebrated in Chapter 31 is Wisdom’s living embodiment, though the book is also replete with less edifying images of the femme fatale. In the Talmud God is regularly featured as father, and Talmudic literature is replete with parables, dialogues and metaphors casting God as a father, both as Father/King/Teacher, and as a more supernal Father in Heaven with whom relations are less direct, who is approached with awe through religious action. At the same time, a more intimate and less forbidding range of divine-human interactions is also to be found; the erotically-charged Song of Songs is read by the Rabbis as an allegory of the loving relationship between God and Israel. Moreover the Rabbis regularly discuss God in terms of two clusters of attributes, middat ha-din and middat ha-rahamim, those of law and mercy, joined in a divine will transcending both. The Talmud also introduces the term Shekhinah to connote God’s presence in the world. Though the term is grammatically feminine, in the Talmud it is not explicitly gendered, though in some passages it refers to moments when God shares in human experiences of loneliness, loss and exile. The Wisdom of Proverbs is, in the Talmud and Midrashim, almost wholly identified with Torah. For the medieval philosophical tradition the ascription of any gender to God was considered both logically impossible and theologically unacceptable. For the philosophers, the Shekhinah was God’s glorious presence and, in a departure from Talmudic usage, a distinct, albeit sublime, creation, yet devoid of any gender. The philosophers avoided feminine personifications of Hokhmah, which they variously understood as referring to the Aristotelian Active Intellect (Levi ben Gershom [Gersonides], 1288–1344); Torah (David Kimhi [Radak], 1160?–1235?); moral instruction (Menahem ben Solomon ha-Meiri, 1249–1316) or practical knowledge (Isaac ben Moses Arama, c. 1420–1494).