The Genderqueer Bible
God likes that big “in between”
Growing up in church, I was told that God loves men best, women are sort of bad, and we all better keep to our assigned sex. Or else.
When I saw Christian art, I was puzzled, for there’s a vast gallery of multi-gendered beings. Later I learned—from scholars—that the artists were onto something. In the Bible, gender is a whirling mystery.
A lot of information about gender is stripped out of Bible translations.
In the book of Jonah, there’s a tale about a prophet swallowed by a whale. No Christian reader is thinking about gender. That would be weird?
“The gender of Jonah’s fish changes twice in the course of its appearance in the book,” notes the scholar Thomas M. Bolin.
A donkey in 2 Samuel 19:26 is a rather queer presence. As Oded Borowski notes, “the masculine form ḥămôr is used with the feminine form of the verb.”
And the gender of donkeys might be an interesting subject. Jesus rides a donkey. In Matthew 21:2, that donkey is female. In John 12:14, it becomes a ‘little donkey’, a neuter case.
