to me, O house of Jacob,
and all the remnant of the house of Israel,
you who are carried by my uterus [meo utero],
you who are borne by my womb [mea vulva].
I have always attempted to be faithful to the original wording. However, sometimes I felt some modifications to be necessary for flow in the English language.
1) The Psalms were originally written as poetry to be sung. Accordingly, I have tried to maintain some semblance of meter, rhyme when appropriate, plays on words and the like. To do this, at times it was necessary to add an adjective or adverb so that the beat could be facilitated in public recitation. In all cases, what I perceive to be the meaning of the text was never violated. Reputable translations were always consulted. Some admirably captured the beauty of a turn of phrase, or the full force of a verb. I am indebted to their insights and sometimes a wording has been borrowed, not out of plagiarism, but out of praise for the translator. In the final analysis there are only so many ways in which a sentence can validly be translated. Biblical translators can appreciate my predicament.
2) Unlike English, nouns in most languages have a grammatical gender: masculine, feminine, or neuter. Verbs likewise take corresponding feminine and masculine endings. Some nouns are grammatically masculine but can refer to either sex of an animal, or some are feminine. Case in point: Isaiah 31:5 refers to birds that are hovering. The noun is grammatically feminine in the singular but becomes masculine in form when plural. In the following verse the verb is in the feminine plural. The verb means “to hover” (especially above a nest); thus I chose to bring out the validly possible feminine metaphor:
Like mother birds hovering over their young
Yahweh Sabaoth will shield Jerusalem;
to protect and save,
to spare and deliver.
But in order to do this, I needed to add the word “mother” to convey the underlying feminine grammatical, as well as metaphorical, text. God being compared to a mother bird is common in the Scriptures.
Also because certain nouns are feminine, this permitted the original authors to create images revolving around women. For example, the word for “wisdom” in Hebrew (as well as in Greek and Latin) is feminine. When Wisdom is personified it is presented as a woman. Many of us are familiar with such passages, especially from Proverbs.
In Hebrew, the word for “spirit” is also feminine. I have not utilized every text in which “spirit” is grammatically followed by a feminine adjective or verb with a feminine ending. However, I have chosen to garner some texts so that the reader can experience how many Aramaic- and Syriac-speaking Christians considered the Holy Spirit to be feminine, inasmuch as they considered God masculine. (Jesus spoke Aramaic.) Recall that God, in and of God’s self, is actually neither male nor female. This grammatical feminine gender of the Spirit allowed Christians to depict the Spirit as mother.
3) Sometimes the richness of a particular word needed to be brought out by more than one word in English. One such word is the Hebrew rachemim, usually translated as “compassion” or “mercy.” Its root is the noun rechem, which unequivocally means “womb.” Thus, in certain passages wherein I believed the context warranted it, I translated rachemim as “maternal compassion.” In fact, Hebrew has five other words for compassion, pity, or mercy. The underlying womb motif in rachemim should not be overlooked. In the famous scene where Solomon must decide to which of two women a certain baby belongs, he purposely proposes to have the child divided in half. He discerns which woman is the true mother by the one who has pity or compassion (rachemim), in other words, the one whose womb is moved for her baby’s welfare. This is lost upon the English reader. In the following text, once again from Isaiah, the feminine imagery is explicit; thus this passage has been used by many. But the richness of the maternal nature of God is missed when rachemim has been translated merely as “pity” or “mercy.”
For Yahweh comforts his people
and displays maternal compassion on his afflicted ones.
Zion was saying, “Yahweh has abandoned me;
the Lord has forgotten me.”
Can a mother forget the baby at her breast,
feel no maternal compassion for the child of her womb?
Even should she forget,
I will never forget you. (Isa 49:13–15)
4) Perhaps nothing is more challenging than the very terms used to refer to God. The Hebrew for “God” is elohim. This noun is actually a plural form, literally “gods,” and at times it is used to refer to the gods of the heathens. However, whenever it refers to the One God of Israel the verb is almost always in the singular, except, for example, in Genesis 1:26—“God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image . . .’” While the grammatical form of elohim is masculine plural, it is theologically understood as singular and thus grammatically followed by the verb in the masculine singular. However, the grammatical singular of elohim is eloah, which is feminine. In one sense, elohim is the perfect word for God because it displays and contains within itself the plurality of the masculine and the feminine. It is plural and yet singular, masculine yet feminine. The term eloah appears several times in the Scriptures and is always followed by the verb in the masculine singular. Scholars believe that rectification of elohim and eloah to be followed by a masculine singular was a conscious act on the part of the copyists who transmitted the written text. However, there is one instance in which the Hebrew text has kept eloah followed by a feminine direct object. It is Job 40:2, “Will the one who contends with Shaddai correct? Let the one who accuses Eloah answer her.” Because in the ears of any Semitic speaker eloah is clearly a feminine noun, possessing the feminine ending, I have chosen not to translate it as “God” but keep it in its original Hebrew/English spelling. I am intending it to carry a feminine aura. Such an intention can be argued when it is realized that the author of Job regularly used eloah in parallel with shaddai, another puzzling term.
Shaddai as a name for God is most ancient. English Bibles, following the Septuagint translation, render it as “Almighty.” Scholars still debate its actual meaning; thus I have not resolutely concluded that shaddai has the feminine meaning I attach to it, but in this book of prayer I am underscoring that valid possibility. Early on, scholars believed that el shaddai meant “God of the Mountain.” However, Albright in 1935 pointed out that the Hebrew word shad means “breast,” and that in the mind of the ancients, a mountain rising up from a plain resembles a breast mounted above the abdomen.8 Having known this, and read other scholarly references arguing that on linguistic grounds el shaddai possibly means “God the Breasted One,” I did my own contextual analysis of the divine name. I was struck at how many times el shaddai is used in a context referring to the blessing of fertility (see Genesis 17:1–22; 28:1–5; 35:8–12; 43:14; 49:25 as well as Ruth 1:1–22 where this blessing was lacking). Of particular interest is the explicit avowal that el shaddai bestows “blessings of breast and womb” (Gen 49:25). Naturally, God the Breasted One would grant such graces of fertility. I mention this because my own independent research was confirmed when I read a scholarly article by Cross.9 He too believes, because of linguistic and textual analysis, that shaddai can validly be interpreted to mean “breasted one,” and was understood as such by the early Hebrews. Of further interest is the contention by Walker that shaddai comes from the Akkadian word shagzu and was an epithet for the god Marduk meaning God the Womb-Wise, or God the Midwife.10
