...when the epithet
Lord is used in place of the divine name, it implicitly treats God’s persona as male, compared to a baseline non-gendered synonym such as
Sovereign. ...
The Treatment of References to Israel’s God
The God-language in this edition presupposes that most readers will identify its main protagonist with the non-gendered God that is the norm in much of present-day religious Judaism. It also respects the fact that the Hebrew text does not allow us to determine exactly what ancient communities themselves believed about the gender of God’s persona. Indeed, whether the Bible’s language is intended to depict a Deity whose persona is beyond gender categories is a matter of longstanding debate in academic circles. Such indeterminacy is best preserved via a gender-neutral presentation, for it allows either a nongendered or gendered reading.
In order to refer to God as a persona in a manner that does not ascribe manly gender, the present edition’s translation team carefully considered a variety of options before undertaking adaptations in three areas: third-person references, the divine name, and metaphors used as epithets. ...
The Divine Name. As noted above, NJPS generally translated God’s ineffable four-letter name, the tetragrammaton, as “the L
ORD” (using small capital letters). To avoid the male connotations of that rendering, the translators weighed various approaches, ...
...this edition adopts an approach rooted in NJPS itself by representing the divine name with the word “God” in small capitals: G
OD. Maintaining the typographic treatment that NJPS used for rendering God’s name as “the L
ORD,” this approach addresses the following three issues that the editorial team deemed to be crucial.
1. Accessibility. The term GOD is immediately recognizable as a reference to the Deity and readily pronounceable by English-speakers. Since one goal of JPS Tanakh translations is to open up the biblical text to readers and communities from a wide range of backgrounds, the translators chose an accessible, familiar, and easy-to-pronounce term.
2. Clarity. Upon reading the text and seeing the small capitals, readers will know that the original Hebrew is God’s name, rather than some other label.
3. Authenticity. The term GOD provides access to the ancient experience of the divine name primarily as a name (rather than as a description or a theological claim). In the Hebrew, this name is distinct from, but exists alongside of, other ways of referring to the Deity. Using two versions of the same word (GOD and God) for this name and for certain other Hebrew terms underscores that the Deity is being invoked in all of these cases, while (as noted above) enabling readers to know which type of expression appears in the biblical text.
While representing the tetragrammaton as “God” works well in most cases, there are instances where it would produce confusion, especially if the translation were read aloud. Particularly in passages where God’s name is followed by the term
’elohim with a possessive pronoun, the result would be awkward: a sequence previously rendered as “the L
ORD your God” would become “G
OD your God.” In such cases, the present edition employs a substitute for the tetragrammaton coined in the 1780s by the German-Jewish philosopher and translator Moses Mendelssohn: “the E
TERNAL” (in his German:
der Ewige). Such substitutions yield more felicitous-sounding phrases. ...
) to Bible translation theory. However, that title is a little too much for me!