וְאֵת֩ חֲזֵ֨ה הַתְּנוּפָ֜ה וְאֵ֣ת ׀ שׁ֣וֹק הַתְּרוּמָ֗ה תֹּֽאכְלוּ֙ בְּמָק֣וֹם טָה֔וֹר אַתָּ֕ה וּבָנֶ֥יךָ וּבְנֹתֶ֖יךָ אִתָּ֑ךְ כִּֽי־חׇקְךָ֤ וְחׇק־בָּנֶ֙יךָ֙ נִתְּנ֔וּ מִזִּבְחֵ֥י שַׁלְמֵ֖י בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃
But the breast of elevation offering and the thigh of gift offering you [and your wife], and your sons and daughters with you, may eat in any pure place, for they have been assigned as a due to you and your sons from the Israelites’ sacrifices of well-being.
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation.)
In this sequential list, the priest’s daughters are explicitly entitled to partake of the donations. What about his wife?
In the context of instructions addressed to a household, the pronoun אַתָּה (“you,” 2ms) refers to the household’s primary couple—its administrative heads (Exod. 20:10; Num. 18:11; Deut. 5:14; 12:18). As Carol Meyers puts it, a nonspecific masculine term can denote also “the female half of a conjugal pair” (pers. comm., 3/4/05).
In general in Biblical Hebrew, nonspecific 2ms address has the force of “to whom it may concern”; it does not (and cannot) specify the addressee’s gender. On how social gender is ascribed (or not) in Biblical Hebrew references, see Stein 2008; Stein 2013.
Here, given the conventions of the time, an ancient Israelite audience would have understood that priests’ wives are implicitly included in אַתָּה. Perhaps ironically, it is by the very lack of explicit address to women that one can demonstrate that they are present in the speaker’s mind. And because their presence is inferable by the audience, there is no need for the speaker to mention them.
Regarding translation into English, the NJPS rendering “you” is not enough to prompt contemporary readers to mentally include the priest’s wife, for they do not share the same linguistic convention as the ancient audience. They are likely to infer instead that the wife (conspicuous by her absence) has been omitted as unimportant—or worse. This mismatch of expectations calls for a clarifying insertion in brackets in the translation. (For simplicity, such an insertion should focus on the typical case, where a husband has only one wife.)