The Anglican Church of Canada’s liturgical butchers have been labouring diligently on expunging all traces of Davidic toxic patriarchy from the psalms. Their efforts have been rewarded by the publishing of the Inclusive Language Liturgical Psalter whose crowning achievement is to use “alternative wordings and/or sentence structures to eliminate the use of predominantly masculine language.”
Thus, rather than Psalm 1 beginning:
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
We have the limp “they” and “their”:
Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, *nor lingered in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seats of the scornful!
Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on this law they meditate day and night.
God himself is not exempt from neutering. Psalm 23, which should begin:
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Has been emasculated into:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want.
You make me lie down in green pastures and lead me beside still waters.
You revive my soul and guide me along right pathways for your name’s sake
This was concocted in 2016 and, as usual with an alleged church desperate to fit in with what is left of the civilization it is supposed to be redeeming, is already woefully outdated. For example, in Psalm 139, we have the deeply problematic:
For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
If the church were truly woke, it would say “my begetter’s womb” in case the womb in question belongs to a they who has chosen to self-identify as a man.
Actually, David, on the translation of Hebrew אִישׁ in Ps. 1 (Blessed is the MAN in older versions) your comment is beside the mark: אִישׁ means “the one, the person”, or in modern English “those”. Hebrew has no other way of expressing the indefinite pronoun in such a context but אִישׁ. That אִישׁ in other contexts should be rendered “man” in the sense of “male man” is an example of semantic anisomorphism.
This is quite an old discussion between real Hebraists and those who smell PC distortion here. “the man” was fine in the AV etc. that were replete with what we hear as archaisms, because “the man” was unisex at that date. Those old translators knew more Hebrew than most moderns and never intended us to understand “male man”.
My only quarrel with the idiomatic plural is that it lacks the immediacy and the personal challenge of the singular “the one”.
The offense behind the Canadian psalterations has to do with the generic use of man in biblical and Western languages, where ’ish can refer to Everyman. Sometimes ’ish can be translated “each”: “These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his [masc. sing.] household” (Exodus 1:1 ESV).
This usage was standard in English until the 1980s when feminists decided that such “patriarchal” language did not include them. Hence, in the singularly inept revision of “Holy, holy, holy,” “the eye of sinful man” became “the sinful human eye.”
The “man” in Psalm 1 can indeed refer collectively to the worshiping congregation, but it is the worshiping congregation in Christ. The Psalter, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, is “the prayer book of Christ.” This messianic reading is inherent in the OT canon. Psalm 2 forms an inclusio with Psalm 1 when its final verse reads: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
Many orthodox believers swallowed inclusive language for “us men and our salvation” in order to fight the larger battle for God-language. I fear we may have sold our birthright in Christ, who is very God and very Man.
Yes, and one could add a note on the range of meanings of Heb. אִישׁ, that sometimes אִישׁ אִישׁ occurs with the sense “one by one”. The term has no necessarily male or human connotation.
English renderings of these words of the second section of the Nicene Creed Τoν δι’ ἡμᾶς τοὺς ’ΑΝΘΡΏΠους (who for us men) καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν (and for our salvation) κατελθόντα ἐκ τῶν οὐρανῶν (came down from heaven) καὶ σαρκωθέντα ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου (and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary) καὶ ἐνΑΝΘΡΩΠήσαντα (and was made man) which elide the careful repetition of the ανθρωπ part of the two words are less than adequate. Sometimes for instance one meets “for us and for our salvation”. The Lord came down from heaven for the salvation of men in the sense of HUMAN BEINGS, not for that of angels, beasts or inanimate objects, and He became a man in the sense of a HUMAN BEING, not an angel, beast or inanimate object. ἐνΑΝΘΡΩΠήσαντα is an aorist participle of a verb which was almost certainly a Christian coinage to express the idea of God’s being made man. Cf. this volume: https://www.amazon.ca/We-Believe-Understanding-Nicene-Creed/dp/1775106233/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1559204395&sr=8-1
“What think ye of Christ? whose son is He?’ was our LORD Jesus Christ’s final question to the offense of unbelief in Him as Messiah both as The ‘Son of David” AND as The ‘LORD of David’
+ Matthew 22:41-46, whose own Scriptural confirmation He draws upon from + Psalm 110. This is the very heart of Christian Soteriology whose Scriptural antecedent is posed by Him at Caesarea Philippi + “But whom say ye that I AM?” + Matthew 16:15, upon which Truth He would build His Church.
Anti-Scriptural alteration of these Eternal, Holy, Infallible Truths receives due warning both in + Deuteronomy 4:2 and + The Revelation of Jesus Christ 22:18,19.
The Bible, which must be translated into all human languages, uses concrete terms. “Man” is less conceptual than person, human, one, etc. It echoes back to Adam (“Man”), and forward to the second Adam, Christ. It goes deep into the soul in a way that human, person, people etc. do not. It is the right word.
Sometimes a little linguistics is not just helpful but essential. There is a long-sounding technical term Semantic Anisomorphism. It is shorter than saying that there never are exact one-for-one equivalents between languages. The textbook case is that in no two languages known to man do even the simple terms which we might translate Red, Green and Blue connote exactly the same hues. To give a couple of examples: there’s the note of the new German lodger to his Edinburgh landlady, “A train runs through my room. Unless you give me another ceiling, I must undress”; by which he meant, “A draft runs through my room. Unless you give me another bedcover, I must move out”. Or what the German lady who climbed onto the London double-decker, but got separated from her husband who had the cash, said to the conductor when he approached her for her fare, “The Lord is above”; an unexceptionable theological statement, but she meant to say, “The gentleman/my husband is upstairs”. Two rather basic terms, which we might in some contexts render “man” or “woman”, are, in the five other languages I know best, two modern, three ancient, four Indo-European and one Semitic, Fr. homme, Ger. Mann, Lat. vir, Gk. ἀνήρ, Heb. אִִִיש Fr. femme, Ger. Frau, Lat. mulier, Gk. γύνη, Heb. אשה. In no case is the semantic overlap complete between any of these. The Greek lexeme for ‘man’ may also mean ‘master, husband, sir’. The equivalent for ‘woman’ may mean ‘lady, mistress, wife’. Context is all.