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Feminine Holy Spirit?
#10
crosswayokc Wrote:Thanks guys. The reason I asked is because there is a new cult out there called "amightywind.com" and they claim that the Holy Spirit is the Father's girlfriend who gave spiritual birth to Jesus before he came to earth. They claim that if we had the "original "Hebrew" or "Aramaic" (they are not sure which) version of John that Jesus would be calling the Holy Spirit "She", because that is his mom. ShabbatSealed is one of their followers.

"The word for spirit in Aramaic is grammatically feminine. When using verbs and adjectives around gramatically feminine nouns they must also be in the feminine form. That doesn't mean the Holy Spririt is feminine. Other non-English languages like French have similar features. "
Paul Younan

"After looking at the example of John 16:13 and a few others, it appears to me that the Holy Spirit is either "masculine" or "common" grammatically, and not likely to be "feminine".
Jerry
If I may make so bold, I think everyone is right. I would like to point out to begin with that the definite article in Aramaic makes this a more complicated question than it is in Hebrew. In Hebrew, "spirit" is decidedly feminine, and is always given feminine pronouns after such was created (note that in the Pentateuch there was no feminine pronoun, so "hu" served both genders). However, according to the grammar I have here, in Biblical Aramaic, rukha is treated as decidedly feminine. See, for instance, Daniel 2:35, where it does not make sense for the alef suffix to be making the word definite, and the verb is (nesa') is feminine, as well. Note also Daniel 6:4 (6:3 in most English versions).
In Greek, it is decidedly neuter. No way around it. In Aramaic, on the other hand, I'm a bit confused. I was under the impression that the masculine personal pronoun was spelled hey-waw-alef. In places like John 16:13 the word accused of being a masculine pronoun is spelled hey-waw. I don't claim to speak Aramaic, and I have no idea what this word is all about.
Now, I've just looked it up, and hey-waw is used as an alternate form of the 3ms personal pronoun. Handy things, reference grammars. Alright, so in the New Testament, a masculine pronoun is certainly used to refer to the Spirit. Unfortunately, using my software I can't find a feminine pronoun anywhere. At least, not the ones that my grammar lists as the Aramaic pronouns (it's a grammar of Biblical Aramaic, so it could very well be using the wrong ones. If anyone knows of a 3fs personal pronoun appearing in the Peshitta, feel free to point it out to me).
Now, I can see clearly that in Judean Aramaic, Rukha is also treated as feminine. I'm looking at 1QapGenB, colum 20, line 29 if anyone is interested in looking it up. Here, rukha is clearly treated as feminine.

Now, I've just done another search in the Peshitta. I wanted to see where all huw is used. I think matthew 1:20 is very telling. Mary is referred to using the pronoun "huw" in the same sentence that rukha is referred to using the pronoun "huw." Here's going to be my guess, without having a morphological resource handy: by the time the Peshitta was written, hey-waw had replaced hey-yod-alef as the 3fs pronoun. It was not exclusive, though, since we can also see Yeshua referred to as "huw" hey-waw. So this pronoun doesn't actually seem to have a gender in the Peshitta.

Now, I haven't checked out the ideas of the website about the spirit being God's wife or whatever it is, and those are certainly unfounded. However, they are not unfounded because Spirit is not feminine. It is feminine in Hebrew, and in just about every Aramaic source I have found any conclusive evidence in rukha is treated as feminine. The pronouns of the Peshitta don't really seem to be admissible as evidence, either. So we may need to find a different approach, such as verbal suffixes, to establish the gender of rukha in the Peshitta. What these people must realise is that it is not only God's spirit that is treated as feminine. In Daniel and in all of the Judean Aramaic documents I looked through the wind and various spirits of people are referred to in the feminine. It is not so much that God's spirit is feminine as that the word is grammatically feminine. The two are not the same. If we were to talk about my spirit in Hebrew we would talk about it as though it were feminine. does that mean that I am a woman? No.

Anyway, I'm sorry it's late, and I'm very disorganized because I'm in the process of moving and I'm not entirely sure where some of my books are. I've had to dig two of them out of boxes to look things up for this post. Hopefully my ramblings were helpful to somebody.
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Messages In This Thread
Feminine Holy Spirit? - by crosswayokc - 04-10-2010, 06:00 PM
[No subject] - by Paul Younan - 04-11-2010, 05:47 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by crosswayokc - 04-11-2010, 08:08 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by Jerry - 04-12-2010, 06:08 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by ShabbatSealed - 04-13-2010, 01:32 AM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by crosswayokc - 04-15-2010, 04:53 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by Jerry - 04-15-2010, 09:45 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by ShabbatSealed - 04-23-2010, 02:11 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by crosswayokc - 05-09-2010, 06:19 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by Dawid - 05-11-2010, 05:17 AM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by Lars Lindgren - 05-11-2010, 02:32 PM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by Jerry - 05-12-2010, 12:32 AM
Re: Feminine Holy Spirit? - by Jerry - 05-12-2010, 12:44 AM

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