An innocent perusal of an article on Scriptural exegesis prompted an arousal of interest which is summarised in the lines which follow.
I am a subscriber to the excellent Kolbe Centre site's newsletter. The latest issue touches on a number of subjects, including the interpretation of the following text from the Book of Genesis:
I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.
Inimicitias ponam inter te et mulierem, et semen tuum et semen illius : ipsa conteret caput tuum, et tu insidiaberis calcaneo ejus. [Gen. iii. 15]
The relevant text of the newsletter may be found at the end of this post (see The Symphony of Catholic Scriptural Exegesis). For the moment, I invite readers to note the pronouns she and ipsa highlighted above. Of this text, the Kolbe article states:
Genesis contains a grammatical feature that cannot be found anywhere in the Old Testament except in the first five books of the Bible—the epicene personal pronoun [emphasis added]. This is a pronoun that has no gender so that the correct gender is determined by the verb—a feature that would surely be present in some other part of the Old Testament if the consensus view in Catholic academia were correct and the first five books of the Bible were produced one thousand years after the time of Moses. One of the places where the epicene personal pronoun appears has a special significance for all Catholics but most especially for those who strive to defend the traditional reading of Genesis. It is in Genesis iii. 15, the protoevangelium, where God says to Satan, “I will put enmities between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed.” But should the next sentence read “He,” “She” or “It” “will crush your head”?
To read the answer to that question, please see the Addendum below.
I looked up the word epicene in the OED and was quite surprised to discover that its etymology is traced through epicœnus / epicœnos all the way back to the ancient Greek ἐπῐ́κοινος, meaning:
promiscuous, sluttish...
I wonder whether the epicene pronoun might not address the ever-wakeful (wokeful?) sensitivities of the wandering word-crawlers who patrol our language nowadays? Or does the promiscuous and sluttish etymology render the epi-cene too ob*-cene...?
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| Latin master declining an epicene pronoun. |
With grateful acknowledgements (and apologies) to Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.
Requiescant In Pace.
Addendum : The Symphony of Catholic Scriptural Exegesis
Readers of this newsletter know that St. Lawrence of Brindisi is the last Doctor of the Church to have written a detailed commentary on Genesis. He knew the whole Bible by heart, knew all the Biblical languages and was familiar with all of the greatest commentators in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Readers also know that Cornelius a Lapide was commissioned by the Pope to devote his life to preparing a commentary on the Holy Bible. He, too, mastered all the Biblical languages and was familiar with the greatest commentators on the Bible in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. These two giants in the field of Biblical commentary agree that none of the three readings of the epicene personal pronoun in Genesis 3:15 should be rejected. Lapide writes:
Note first that none of these three readings [of Genesis 3:15] is to be rejected. No, indeed: All [the masculine, the feminine and the neuter] are true readings. For in this verse, when God sets the two against each other as if they were opponents in a contest — the woman with her seed against the serpent with its seed — He consequently wishes to say that the woman with her seed will crush the head of the serpent, just as, on the other hand, the serpent lies in wait for the heel of both the woman and her seed. And therefore in this verse Moses seems to have mixed the masculine verb with the feminine pronoun, saying ישוף היא, hî’ yəšūp̄, she shall crush, in order to signify both the woman and her seed; or rather, the woman through her seed, namely through Christ, shall crush the head of the serpent.
It is interesting to note that St. Jerome in at least one of his writings took the view that “He” and not “She” (“Ipsa,” as in the Latin Vulgate) was the correct translation of the pronoun in that verse. However, He Who Is Truth Itself saw to it that the Vulgate became the official version of the Bible for the Church of Rome and that "ipsa" emerged as the primary reading in the Vulgate ("She" in the Douai-Rheims English translation of the Vulgate), even if that was not the original preference of St. Jerome himself.
SUB tuum præsidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genitrix. Nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus, sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta. Amen.
The Vladimirskaya Icon. >12th century.
