לְפָנִ֣ים ׀ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל כֹּֽה־אָמַ֤ר הָאִישׁ֙ בְּלֶכְתּוֹ֙ לִדְר֣וֹשׁ אֱלֹהִ֔ים לְכ֥וּ וְנֵלְכָ֖ה עַד־הָרֹאֶ֑ה כִּ֤י לַנָּבִיא֙ הַיּ֔וֹם יִקָּרֵ֥א לְפָנִ֖ים הָרֹאֶֽה׃
Formerly in Israel, such a person who went to inquire of God would say, “Come, let us go to the seer,” for the prophet of today was formerly called a seer.—
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew term containing אִישׁ, by employing a situation-oriented construal as outlined in this introduction, pp. 11–16.)
In this parenthetic and schematic statement, the term הָאִישׁ refers to an aforementioned participant in a depicted situation in terms of that situation. Thus it is playing one of its classic discourse roles.
In the clause כֹּה־אָמַר הָאִישׁ בְּלֶכְתּוֹ לִדְרוֹשׁ אֱלֹהִים, the conventional wisdom (found in several dictionaries going back to at least 1792) is that this usage of אִישׁ is one-of-a-kind, in that its force is like an indefinite pronoun—even though the deixis is marked as definite via the article. That special pleading qualifies this instance as an interpretive crux.
Happily, when viewed from a situation-oriented vantage point, we see that this referring expression is definite so that it can refer to the already-identified servant—not as an individual but rather as a type: namely, a typical participant in this depicted situation. See Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (2017) §24.4.4(4) [emphasis in original]: “The article is used generically to designate a class of persons or things that are definite in themselves.” One example is 1 Sam 14:24, אָרוּר הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר־יֹאכַל לֶחֶם “Cursed be anyone who eats any food…,” where the subject noun phrase refers to those who fit the stated criterion. Similarly in this case, there is a well-known class of people who seek clairvoyant knowledge from representatives of the divine. In other words, the narrator’s parenthetic statement is actually not generic (about “anyone” or “someone,” as in NRSV, REB, NIV) so much as it is situated at this moment within the larger story. That is what אִישׁ is normally used for, which makes this instance unexceptional.
As for gender, the ancient audience would not have ruled out that women could be in view in seeking out a clairvoyant (cf. Rebekah in Gen 25:22, and Jeroboam’s wife in 1 Kgs 14:5).
As for rendering into English, the NJPS ‘when a man went to inquire of God, he would say’ nowadays puts undue limitation on the referents’ gender. Idiomatic English does not specify gender at this juncture; it is not at issue.
The revised rendering recasts the clause in order to reflect the above considerations.