Exodus 21:7 - On the noun אִישׁ

(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 אִישׁ, by employing a situation-oriented construal as outlined in this introduction, pp. 11–16.)

Here the situating noun אִישׁ labels the essential party whose involvement defines the situation of interest. It is a prototypical usage, pointing our attention to the situation—and then to its implications.

And אִישׁ is used to refer to a category of persons, rather than a specific individual. Such references, by their nature, do not exclude women from their scope (Stein 2008; Stein 2013).

In terms of societal norms, both men and women are in view. Elsewhere in the Bible (2 Sam 14:5–7, 2 Kgs 4:1, Job 24:9, and Ruth 1:3), it is a given for an Israelite household that in the father’s absence, the mother served as its head. Furthermore, in such cases, the mother necessarily had authority over her children’s fate, which would include whether to sell or surrender them into slavery—however unwillingly (cf. Neh 5:5 with v. 1).

This reflects a reality beyond the biblical world. As Nahum Sarna wrote in The JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus (ad loc.), poverty might drive a father in the ancient world to sell his daughter “into a well-to-do family in order to ensure her future security.” The same applies to a mother as householder. Carolyn Pressler notes that across the ancient Near East, “a range of cuneiform documents also record the sale of children by mothers” (“Wives and Daughters, Bond and Free: Views of Women in the Slave Laws of Exodus 21.2–11,” in Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, eds. Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998], 166–67; see further there). Presumably such norms and actual practice were known to the text’s original audience.

Thus we have no warrant to translate in gendered terms.

As for rendering into English, the NJPS “a man” nowadays restricts gender unduly. (In contrast, in 1962 when the NJPS Torah was first published, “man” was still commonly used generically in American legal texts.) To avoid the likely misreading of “a man” as indicating a male only, I render more generically. Alternatively, “When anyone sells their daughter…”

In rendering as ‘parent’, I do not claim that the noun אִישׁ itself means ‘parent’ as a matter of its semantics. Rather, because English nowadays lacks a situating noun that is gender-inclusive, the most appropriate equivalent is a relational noun (see my comment at Josh 10:24).