יַרְכִּבֵ֙הוּ֙ עַל־[בָּ֣מֳתֵי] (במותי) אָ֔רֶץ
וַיֹּאכַ֖ל תְּנוּבֹ֣ת שָׂדָ֑י
וַיֵּנִקֵ֤הֽוּ דְבַשׁ֙ מִסֶּ֔לַע
וְשֶׁ֖מֶן מֵחַלְמִ֥ישׁ צֽוּר׃
[God] set them atop the highlands,
To feast on the yield of the earth;
Nursing them with honey from the crag,
And oil from the flinty rock,
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation—an adaptation of the NJPS translation.)
The verb וַיֵּנִיק has a grammatically masculine inflection, yet it describes a biologically female act: suckling an infant. The paradox is only apparent: the implied subject is God, and a grammatically masculine inflection expresses only that God’s persona is not exclusively womanly (not that it is manly). The text’s ancient Israelite audience did not confuse grammatical gender concord with the content of the message, nor did they confuse the gender of predicated imagery with the gender of the subject’s persona.
Indeed, the entire verse, which focuses on God’s sustaining the people, may well have had a feminine cast in the view of the ancient audience. As Carol Meyers writes, “The household tasks of women in ancient Israel included … preparing and serving food.… These activities … were largely a women’s domain. Therefore, biblical texts acclaiming God as a provider of … food … evoke culturally specific images of women’s tasks” (Women in Scripture, 2000, p. 527).
As for the translation, the NJPS rendering “He fed him” glosses over the motherly action attributed to God. Yet this is poetry—the concreteness of the image matters. The revised rendering conveys the female image. The gerund form avoids a gendered pronoun.
(On them versus him in reference to Israel, see the translators’ footnote to verse 10.)