Gender Issues in Ancient and Reformation Translations of Genesis 1-4

This book deals with Bible translation and its development from Antiquity to the Reformation. Helen Kraus compares and analyses those translated passages in Genesis 1-4 that deal with the male-female dynamic, tracing linguistic and ideological processes and seeking to determine the extent of interaction between contemporary culture and translation. In response to the challenge of late 20th-century 'second wave' feminist scholarship, Kraus considers the degree and development of androcentricity in these passages in both Hebrew and translated texts. The study is therefore something of a hybrid, comprising exegesis, literary criticism and reception history, and draws together a number of hitherto discrete approaches.

After an introduction to the problems of translation, and exegesis of the Hebrew text, five translations are examined: The Septuagint (the first Greek translation, thought to date from the 3rd century BCE), Jerome's 4th-century CE Latin Vulgate version, Luther's pioneering German vernacular Bible of 1523, the English Authorized Version (1611), and the Dutch State Bible (1637). A brief study of contemporary culture precedes each exegetical section that compares translation with the Hebrew text. Results of the investigation point to the Hebrew text showing significant androcentricity, with the Septuagint, possibly influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasizing the patriarchal elements. This trend persists through the Vulgate and even Luther's Bible - though less so in the English and Dutch versions - and suggests that the translators are at least partly responsible for an androcentric text becoming the justification for the oppression of women.

Inderjeet Mani has been a Senior Principal Scientist at The MITRE Corporation, a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Automatic Summarization (John Benjamins 2001) and The Imagined Moment: Time, Narrative, and Computation (Nebraska 2010), and co-editor of The Language of Time (OUP 2005).

James Pustejovsky is the TJX/Feldberg Chair in Computer Science at Brandeis University. His topics of research are natural language processing, lexical semantics, temporal reasoning, events, information extraction, and computational linguistics. His books include The Generative Lexicon (MIT 1995); with Bran Boguraev, Lexical Semantics: The Problem of Polysemy (OUP 1997); with Carol Tenny, Events as Grammatical Objects (CSLI 2001); with Elisabetta Jezek, Generative Lexicon Theory: A Guide (OUP 2012); and Coercion and Compositionality (MIT Press 2012).