Words and texts change in transmission, but sometimes the result can be the silencing of a voice or an idea.
This phenomenon is, of course, well-attested and recognized. Think of the game “Telephone” (or “Chinese Whispers” or “Russian Scandal”, depending on your upbringing and/or loyalties): one person says something to another, then it is repeated to the next person, and so on down the line until it has morphed into something quite different and possibly unrecognizable from its original form. This sort of thing happens all the time in the world of textual transmission—Greek tragedies, for example, are excellent places to see medieval monks’ copying abilities really go to town on a text—and there is a highly specialized (black) art to piecing together all the different evidence from all the different versions in circulation to try to determine which reading is the closest to the original text.
The Bible, of course, has been subject to some really terrible textual transmission problems over the centuries. If you’re interested in this on a scale larger than the small examples I plan to deal with in this essay, check out Bart Ehrman’s excellent book Misquoting Jesus. But for the moment, allow me to illustrate with a trivial example, and please bear with me—I promise this does get interesting: Psalm 145, which is recited as part of the traditional Jewish liturgy three times daily. The psalm is an alphabetic acrostic, having one verse beginning which each letter of the alphabet. However, one letter—nun—appears to be missing: the psalm skips right from mem to samekh.
Why is there no verse for the letter nun? The traditional Jewish answers are completely full of nonsense. For example, one traditional explanation is that nun stands for all kinds of bad things, like n’filah—”downfall”—so the Psalmist avoided the letter the letter to avoid referring to the possibility of the people Israel’s future downfall. Never mind the fact that every other acrostic uses the letter nun, such as Psalm 34 or the first four chapters of the Book of Lamentations.
In fact, the explanation is much simpler. Our oldest manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, on which the Hebrew text of the Bible is based, are only as recent as the eleventh century CE. If you look further back in history, you find older texts—the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as ancient translations of the Bible into Greek and Syriac—and do you know what? All of these texts have a line corresponding to the letter nun. Only the comparatively recent Masoretic Text does not.
What conclusion can we draw? The simplest explanation is that somewhere between antiquity and the eleventh century, a scribe skipped the nun verse while copying out Psalm 145, and his version ended up being codified as the basis for all future texts. Later, many silly arguments were developed by overzealous exegetes to explain this “absence” of a verse. But in reality the verse has been there all the time, just not in the one text considered to be “authoritative”.
It’s this kind of bullshit that leads to the silencing of voices—and sometimes those voices are women’s voices, or at least feminine voices.
One of my favourite Hebrew poems is Yedid Nefesh, composed by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Eliezer Azikri. The poem is a love song between a lover and God—but the God character in the poem is often spoken of in the feminine. It is very difficult to translate the poem into English, which does not make gender distinctions in its second-person pronouns, and retain the ambiguity present in the extremely dense Hebrew. But the fact remains that the God of Yedid Nefesh is in some respects feminine and in some respects masculine.
Since it was written, Yedid Nefesh has been copied and recopied so many times that whole lines now bear no resemblance to the way they were originally written. This is ridiculous because the manuscript version—in the author’s own handwriting—still exists. Yet the versions of this poem that circulate in the Jewish liturgical world bear very little resemblance to the work of striking beauty—and gender ambiguity—that was what the author originally wrote. The conception of the character of God has become much less fluid; all the pronouns have been turned into masculine pronouns, and the poem now presents a much less “threatening” image of God for the traditional Jew.
Whether what has happened has been a deliberate masculinizing of a feminine voice or simply the vicissitudes of history taking their toll on this poem is irrelevant: this God has been masculinized either way. Since it doesn’t jive with traditional Jewish notions of God’s masculinity, it is heretical and wrong. Even though the original text the way Charlie actually wrote it still exists, only a scant few prayer books print the true text. Bad textual transmission has meant that a feminine voice, a feminine conception of God, has been silenced.
So what are we to do about this? Do we sing the Yedid Nefesh the way the author wrote it, or do we sing the “traditional” and corrupted version? Do we put the nun verse back into the Hebrew text of Psalm 145, or do we leave it out? My mind isn’t quite made up, and I’d like to throw this topic open for debate (that is, if anyone’s had the fortitude to stick with me this far into the essay): At what point—if any—should we restore the original version of a text to a liturgy? My own feeling is that, as for Psalm 145, the nun verse should stay out, since that’s how it’s been recited for a thousand years and this tradition has developed a life of its own. Yet as for the feminine God of Yedid Nefesh, I think that the textual corruption has become so bad and so destructive that more drastic measures should be taken—like restoring the poem to the way it was actually written. Not only would this restore the text to its original form, but it would restore an arresting and challenging conception of a God who is both masculine and feminine into a world where such conceptions of God are sorely lacking.