skip to content
likesHumidity
Table of Contents

“He.” Two letters. A Proto-Germanic pronoun that came down through Old English into its current form. Used for every male human being, every male animal, every grammatically masculine noun in the language. Used in sentences like he went to the store, he scratched his ear, he knocked over the trash can. The word carries no particular dignity, no weight, no sacredness. It is one of the most ordinary, unremarkable pronouns in English.

I aim to call the Divine with more reverence than “he” provides.

Now consider what the Hebrew tradition actually did with the divine name. YHWH — the Tetragrammaton — was so sacred it could not be spoken aloud. By the late Second Temple period, the name was pronounced only by the High Priest, only on Yom Kippur, only inside the Holy of Holies. With the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, even that one annual utterance ceased, and over time the correct pronunciation was lost entirely. The tradition chose silence over inadequacy.

And later English translators replaced it with “he.”

The contrast is the argument. One tradition: a name so sacred it cannot be spoken; a practice of substituting silence or circumlocution for any attempt at direct naming; the pronunciation deliberately allowed to be lost rather than approximated. The other tradition: a two-letter pronoun used daily for every male entity from cattle to coworkers, applied to the infinite source of all existence without ceremony, without comment, without any acknowledgment of its staggering inadequacy.

Where is the reverence? Where in the word “he” is the weight of what is being named?

I think God is more than a man in the clouds. More than any image, more than any pronoun, more than any sentence that begins with a subject and a verb.

This series is going to spend a year asking what changes if we let go of imagining otherwise.

The many names.

The Hebrew Bible does not use one name for God. It uses dozens — each an attempt to capture a different facet of the divine reality, each explicitly partial.

Every name is partial. Every name reaches toward something the previous name did not fully capture. The tradition knew — and encoded in its own practice — that no single name, no single word, no single grammatical category could contain the divine reality. And Revelation 19:12 says the Word of God has “a name written that no one knows but himself.” After all those dozens of names, the name remains finally unknown.

The tradition required many names because no one name was enough. “He” is one casual pronoun.

What the ancestral languages actually do.

Both Hebrew and Aramaic have grammatical gender — masculine and feminine. Hebrew makes masculine the default for mixed groups and abstract concepts. When God takes masculine verb forms in Hebrew, this tells us about Hebrew grammar — not about God’s nature. The same grammatical structure that gives God masculine forms makes “table” (shulchan) masculine and “earth” (eretz) feminine. Grammatical gender is not ontological gender.

And crucially: the divine reality in the Hebrew texts is not grammatically unified.

  • Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit, the Breath of God hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:2 ) — grammatically feminine in both Hebrew and Aramaic.
  • Hokhmah (Wisdom, personified in Proverbs 8 as the creative agent present at the origin of the world) — grammatically feminine.
  • Shekhinah (the divine indwelling presence) — grammatically feminine.
  • Elohim (the most common divine name in Genesis) — grammatically plural.
  • YHWH — grammatically ungendered.

The Syriac Church — which prayed in Aramaic, the language Jesus actually spoke — addressed the Holy Spirit with feminine pronouns for the first four centuries of Christian practice. The shift came in the early fifth century, when scribes producing the Peshitta translation altered specific verses — notably Luke 12:12 and John 14:26 — from feminine to masculine. Before that revision, Syriac Christians sang of the Spirit as mother. The Aramaic-speaking tradition prayed to a maternal Spirit for four hundred years.

Through Greek and Latin translation, the Spirit kept changing grammatical gender according to each language’s rules — feminine in Aramaic (Ruach), neuter in Greek (pneuma), masculine in Latin (spiritus). The grammatical gender was never the point. The tradition changed the grammar every time it crossed a linguistic border.

The English later settled on “he” and stopped moving.

What the texts say about their own inadequacy.

If the question is whether human language can adequately name God, the texts answer the question themselves.

  • Isaiah 55:8 –9 — “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways… For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways.”
  • Job 26:14 — “Behold, these are but the outskirts of [God’s] ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of [God]!”
  • Psalm 145:3 — “[God’s] greatness is unsearchable.”
  • Romans 11:33 — “How unsearchable are [God’s] judgments and how inscrutable [God’s] ways.”
  • Philippians 4:7 — God has “a peace that surpasses all understanding.”
  • Revelation 19:12 — the Word of God has “a name written that no one knows but himself.”

If God exceeds human understanding by Scripture’s own testimony, God certainly exceeds human grammar. To insist on a gendered pronoun for a being whose nature the texts explicitly describe as beyond human comprehension is to prioritize the conventions of patriarchal language over the texts’ own testimony about what God is.

This posture is not unique to Scripture. The most ancient and respected approach to theological language across the Abrahamic traditions arrives at the same conclusion. The via negativa — the negative way — describes God only by what God is not, because every positive description reduces the infinite to finite categories. Maimonides argued in his Guide for the Perplexed (Part I, Ch. 58) that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.” Pseudo-Dionysius, in The Mystical Theology, says God is “beyond every assertion” and “beyond every denial.” Ibn Arabi’s tanzih — God’s incomparability — says the same. The Reformed tradition crystallized it in a phrase — finitum non capax infiniti, the finite cannot contain the infinite.

Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Reformed. Using no pronoun for God is not a modern intrusion on the tradition. It is the tradition.

The first refusal: [God] in brackets.

Where a biblical quote in translation uses a gendered pronoun for God, this series replaces it with [God] in brackets.

Standard translation: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his ways higher than your ways” (Isaiah 55:9 )

Series version: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are [God’s] ways higher than your ways”

The brackets are transparent. They show the reader that a substitution has been made, and signal that the earlier text — chronologically closer to the source — used a pronoun but this document declines to reproduce the patriarchal interpretive choice embedded in that translation. This is not a denial that the translation tradition used masculine pronouns. It is a refusal to allow a translation tradition to stand in for the infinite reality the texts are gesturing toward.

The second refusal: no verdict.

This series makes a second refusal alongside the pronoun. The reasoning is in Genesis 3.

One tree’s fruit was forbidden — the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Humans ate it anyway. The text says explicitly what the fruit conferred: knowledge of good and evil. The capacity to make moral judgments.

But notice what the story does not say. It does not say humans, after eating, became competent to wield this knowledge. It says they gained access to the category — and the very next thing they do is blame each other, hide from [God], and walk away from a garden of effortless abundance into a life of toil. The first recorded use of moral discrimination by human beings is the blame-and-shame exchange between Adam and Eve. The fruit gave humans enough knowledge to make judgments. It does not appear to have given us enough knowledge to make the right ones.

If the texts say humans acquired the category of judgment without the competence to use it, the responsible move is to sit in the space of observation and knowledge without judgment. To describe what is here. To notice. To trace what is happening and what produced it. To resist the impulse to say this is evil — because that impulse is precisely the fruit Genesis warns about.

Jesus puts it directly: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1 –2). He does not say judgment does not exist. He says that judgment rebounds — that the measure you use will be used on you. This is the Genesis 3 observation in different words: the fruit gave humans the category of judgment without giving them the competence to wield it, and what they cannot wield, wields them.

The distinction in practice is the difference between healing an illness and shaming an ill person for being ill. A healing approach asks how the system works, what is not working, how it could work, and how to change it. Instead of blame and judgment, opportunity and salve.

This series chooses the healing approach.

This is not relativism, and the commitment is methodological, not absolute. Patterns can be named. Harms can be named. Asymmetries can be named. A system that produces scarcity from abundance can be described in operational terms — what it does, who it benefits, who it costs — without this series claiming to know its standing in some cosmic ledger. Where the texts themselves speak in the language of good and evil, this series will quote them in their own language. But in this series’ own voice, the default is observation without verdict.

This series does not call things right or wrong, good or evil, cast aspersions, or force a prescriptive outcome. Instead it describes the mechanisms at work and the history they have produced, and shares the results of my own experimentation toward practical, gentle healing — toward the recovery of abundance, offered rather than demanded. What this series provides is materials for the reader’s own work: how systems function, how they break, how they have been changed, what I have tried, what I would try next. The reader does what they will with all of it.

Two refusals, one stance.

Two refusals. No pronoun. No verdict.

The Hebrew tradition lived for centuries with a God whose name could not be spoken. By the time the Temple fell, that name had been pronounced aloud only by one person, only one day a year, only in one room. Then the room was destroyed and the pronunciation was lost. The tradition kept the name anyway — in writing, in silence, in the four letters no one would say.

Learning to read without a pronoun is less than that.

[God] is a held place. The withheld judgment is a held silence. Both acknowledge a gap that has always been there — the gap between what we can say and what we are reaching for.

The gate was never locked. We walked away from the garden. We can walk back.