If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil by Dennis Prager - 6

The complete desexualization of God and of religion was a radical innovation of the Torah. In religions before the Torah and in its own time, gods were depicted as celestial men and women, and those gods engaged in sexual activity—with human beings and with other gods. In the Torah, God is never depicted either as a man or as a woman and is completely removed from any sexuality.

Before the Torah, religion had never before been wholly removed from the sexual realm.

However, the Torah does depict God in the masculine. Hebrew is one of the few languages in the world in which verbs are masculine and feminine. They must, therefore, agree with the noun to which they refer in gender and in number. For example, the verb “created” in the first verse of the Torah is in the masculine and in the singular. So, we immediately know there is not more than one God and there is no goddess.

Gender-wise, the Torah had three choices in depicting God:

Masculine

Feminine

Neuter

We can readily rule out the third choice. First, a neutered depiction of God is simply impossible in Hebrew. Unlike English and most other languages, there are no neuter verbs or nouns in Hebrew.

Second, the biblical God is a personal God to whom we can and must relate. We cannot relate to, let alone obey or love, an “It.”

Moreover, if one wants to depict a genderless God, “he” is closer than “she.” When people hear the word “she,” they immediately imagine a female. But that is not always the case with “he,” which is often used to cover an entire population. For example, when people kill a fly, they say, “I killed him,” because they have no idea—or interest in—whether the fly was male or female.

And no one who heard “I killed him” would think about the fly’s gender. But if a person said, “I killed her,” everyone would immediately think of gender.

Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous to argue the Torah uses the masculine solely because using neuter was not possible. The depiction of God in masculine terms is deliberate because it is essential to the Torah’s fundamental moral purposes.

To understand why, we have to acknowledge three premises:

Given these premises, it is in both men’s and women’s best interests to depict God in the masculine.

When males are young, they need to feel accountable to a male authority figure. Without a father or some other male rule giver, young men are likely to do great harm. If there is no male authority figure to give a growing boy rules, it is very difficult to control his wilder impulses.

In 2008, then–US Senator Barack Obama told an audience, “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools; and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.” Commenting on that speech, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist with Harvard Medical School, confirmed Obama’s statistics: “The absence of fathers corresponds with a host of social ills, including dropping out of school and serving time in jail.”