“ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” in “Aristotle,” “Moses,” and Paul

Quick History of a Greek Frozen Phrase

Around 300 years before Jesus, the phrase “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” showed up in written Greek as something Aristotle supposedly wrote.

Half a century later or so, the phrase “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” showed up in the Bible as the Hellene translation for the Hebrew זכר ונקבה, a recurring phrase in the first of the five books of Moses.

After a couple of centuries of “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” being biblical, the phrase shows up in the gospel of Mark and in the gospel of Matthew as Jesus quoting Genesis.

A few decades later, Paul writes to some of his fellows in the assemblies in Galatia to play on the phrase “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ.”

Some English Frozen Phrases Illustrated

In this post, I’ll say just a bit more about the specific points of Greek literary and translational origins picked out so far. Now, I’d like us to look at how English phrases sometimes are used as “frozen phrases.”

Here are some on the tip of my tongue, just off the top of my head, like “bread and butter,” “peanutbutter and jelly,” “stars and stripes,” “boys and girls,” “cats and dogs,” “Jack and Jill,” “Tom and Jerry,” “Ben and Jerry’s,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “pen and paper,” “planes, trains, and automobiles,” “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” “man and wife,” “husband and wife,” “Lucy and Ricky,” “horse and carriage,” “love and marriage,” “war and peace,” “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” “facebook and twitter,” “stocks and bonds,” “highs and lows,” “ups and downs,” “God and country,” “nickel and dime,” “heart and soul,” and “so forth and so on.”

The frozen phrases I’m rapidly recalling here all include the conjunction and. And I’m only wanting to suggest that these are imprinted in my brain, in my ears and in my eyes, from how I’ve encountered written English and spoken English.

And I’m trying to make only the necessary observations here. First, for example, it should be clear that there is no necessary gender order to this when there are gendered pairs. “Lucy and Ricky” has her coming first; “Jack and Jill” has him coming first. Second, the positive term sometimes comes first as in “highs and lows” while the negative term comes first at other times as with “war and peace.”

Third, it should be obvious that reversing the nouns in any of these frozen phrases makes for a very odd sound. Fourth, written English reinforces, further freezes, what sounds right. To illustrate, we might use the google ngram viewer that allows us to check the phrases written in books that are in the library, or corpus, of google books.

The frozen phrases “bread and butter” and “stars and stripes” and “peanutbutter and jelly” appear in print with the nouns in a very predictable and set or frozen order. Nobody has published “jelly and peanutbutter” in print in a way that the ngram viewer will show:

“Male and Female” as a Frozen Phrase Relative to Others

So in English there are “male and female” gendered frozen phrases, like that frozen phrase “male and female.” I seem to recall at Joel Hoffman’s blog a conversation about whether “man and wife” or “husband and wife” is most prominent, and thus I’m including those two frozen phrases in my google ngram viewer illustration below too.

What I’m more interested in is how equal or unequal the sexes appear to show up in the phrases. The noun “wife” does get used, for example, as a counterpart to “husband.” This makes the phrase “man and wife” arguably a little stranger. Nobody says “wife and man” or “man and husband” or even “woman and husband.” We could speculate all day as to why not or when we might want to say those phrases.

Since we bring up “woman” I do want to comment, again (since I say it a lot), that “wo-man” is a marked noun in English. So is “fe-male.” So is, when we spell it out, the word “s-he.” The unmarked nouns “man” and “male” and “he” get marked with a pre-fix to change the meaning to the feminine version of the default masculine root noun. In frozen phrases such as “male and female” and “men and women” there’s an inherent imbalance that suggests the masculine default unmarked root is the essential noun in the phrase, and the complementary feminine version is, while “equal” to the male counterpart, is just supplemental and simply, well, a subordinate complement. It’s good, then, for us to think about these things, and to talk about them, lest they are under the surface of our consciousness. For some of us language seems or feels somehow to reflect Reality or Nature or God’s Design. It doesn’t.

And our language tends to freeze in phrases. It’s just the way it is. So let’s look at how we tend to read the “male and female” related phrases:

Some of the frozen phrases are clearly more popular than others. Some were more popular at different points in publishing history. (I took out of the mix here one frozen phrase with plural nouns – “men and women” – because it is so much more frequently used than the others – as you’ll see if you click here.)

As my son and my daughters grow into adulthood more in this world, I long for English counterpart terms like the Greek ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ and the Hebrew זכר ונקבה. These phrases do not have a default sex for the sex, the gender, of adult human beings the way our English “men and women” and “male and female” do. So I do tend to try to use “boys and girls” even when referring to adults, even though I always have to explain what I mean since the term applies to children not grown ups. I also like “masculine and feminine” since the phrase includes equal counterparts that does not place one over the other. (Unfortunately, “masculine and feminine” in English is not nearly as often used as “boys and girls” is, and click here to see that fact).

“ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” in “Aristotle,” “Moses,” and Paul

Fortunately, many ancient Greek texts are today digitized by many different scholars, just as much more contemporary English texts are by google, so that we can view frozen phrases as they develop and evolve. It seems the first instance, at least one of the first uses, of “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” appears in “Aristotle’s” Physiognomonics. It’s a treatise that tries to sound a lot like Aristotle, as he might make judgments about the Nature of Things in themselves. The Aristotle-like author writes (on what are Bekker pages 809a – 809b) the following:

Νυνὶ δὲ πρῶτον πειράσομαι τῶν ζῴων διελέσθαι, ὁποῖα αὐτῶν προσήκει διαλλάττειν πρὸς τὸ εἶναι ἀνδρεῖα καὶ δειλὰ καὶ δίκαια καὶ ἄδικα. διαιρετέον δὲ τὸ τῶν ζῴων γένος εἰς δύο μορφάς, εἰς ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ, προσάπτοντα τὸ πρέπον ἑκατέρᾳ μορφῇ. ἔστι δὲ ὅμοια…. τὰ δὲ ἄρρενα τούτοις ἅπασιν ἐναντία, τὴν φύσιν ἀνδρειοτέραν καὶ δικαιοτέραν εἶναι γένει, τὴν δὲ τοῦ θήλεος δειλοτέραν καὶ ἀδικωτέραν.

This was put into English under the direction of W. D. Ross as follows:

I WILL now first attempt to make a division of animals I by the marks in which they are bound to differ if they are respectively brave or timorous, upright, or dishonest. We have to divide the whole animal kingdom for this purpose into two physical types, male and female, and to show what mental attributes are congruous with each of these types…. The male is the opposite of all this: his is the braver and more upright nature, whilst the female  is the more timid and less upright.

One reason this sounds so much like Aristotle is because Aristotle wrote a whole lot about animal sex, and he divided the various species of animals and compared and contrasted them with human beings, always keeping separate males and females, men and women. Another reason the writer of this particular Greek text sounds like Aristotle is the method of writing; there is division, the binary, the constant essentializing of Nature by separation which serves to map out the hierarchy inherent in Nature. A male and female may be equal in species but the female is always inferior, or at the very least under the male in role. (And just to be clear for all those learning Greek and its translation into English, I’m pretty sure that the Pseudo Aristotle is not intending θῆλυ as “breast” as if that part of her anatomy is opposite the male’s somehow.)

What the pseudo Aristotle is writing when writing “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” is that there are two different kinds, non overlapping, that can and should be mapped out separately in Nature, by Nature. There is the binary. There is the dichotomy. There is fundamentally opposition, essentially difference.

In the context, the pairing is more akin to “light and darkness” and “good and evil” and “highs and lows” and “ups and downs,” than it is to “heart and soul” or “peanutbutter and jelly” or “bread and butter” or “stars and stripes.”

Then, much later in history, a good bit far from Athens, in Alexandria the Great City named after Alexander the Great, there comes a real shift in the meaning of “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ.” The shift is Semitic. It comes with the first book of Moses. Of course, as mentioned, in Hebrew we read the phrase זכר ונקבה. There is the emphasis not on separation but on relation. The focus on sex is not on difference so that there is procreation. Rather it is on difference in mixture in conjoinment, so that there is procreation and creation. It’s less obvious science and much more akin, it would seem, to art. The Greekiness becomes less Aristotelian-like and much more Hebrewish. I’m talking now about the Septuagint. The Hellene in the translation of the Hebrew Bible is much more poetic, much more epic, more Homer and Sappho and Hesiod than like that of the patriarchal Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander. The method for language, for naming, is substantially unlike the Aristotelian binary.

The result is that there is what we call Genesis 1:27, 5:2, 6:19-20, 7:2-3, 7:9, and 7:16 respectively, as below here. If we listened to the Greek read aloud, then we’d hear the poetry. Even the verb of Genesis 1:1 is poetry, literally: ἐποίησεν /ePOIEsen/. When we see it we might view the creativity:

καὶ ἐποίησεν
ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον
κατ’ εἰκόνα θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ 
ἐποίησεν αὐτούς

ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
ἐποίησεν αὐτοὺς
καὶ εὐλόγησεν αὐτούς
καὶ ἐπωνόμασεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτῶν Αδαμ
ᾗ ἡμέρᾳ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς

ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
ἔσονται
….
κατὰ γένος αὐτῶν
δύο δύο ἀπὸ πάντων
εἰσελεύσονται πρὸς σὲ
τρέφεσθαι μετὰ σοῦ
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ

…ἑπτὰ ἑπτά
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
…δύο δύο
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
…ἑπτὰ ἑπτά
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
…δύο δύο
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ

δύο δύο
εἰσῆλθον πρὸς Νωε εἰς τὴν κιβωτόν
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
καθὰ ἐνετείλατο αὐτῷ ὁ θεός

καὶ τὰ εἰσπορευόμενα
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ
ἀπὸ πάσης σαρκὸς εἰσῆλθεν
καθὰ ἐνετείλατο ὁ θεὸς τῷ Νωε
καὶ ἔκλεισεν κύριος ὁ θεὸς
ἔξωθεν αὐτοῦ τὴν κιβωτόν

The frozen phrases in the Hebrew of the first book of the five books of Moses, and then in the Hellene of the same, make together as a unit the two.

The emphasis on unity is illustrated when two Greek gospel writers have Jesus quoting Genesis 1:27. Mark 10 and Matthew 19 make the emphasis very strong by literary, rhetorical means. The context is on whether the words of Moses allowed for marital separation. Joshua or Y’Hosea (or Jesus, a Greekified version of the nickname Moses gave his assistant), speaking Greek, would have Greek readers go back to the words of Moses on how humans were created unified: ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ.

Paul picks up this frozen phrase in a rather startling way. He invokes the name of this Jesus/Joshua/Y’Hosea to say:

οὐκ ἔνι
Ἰουδαῖος οὐδὲ Ἕλλην,
οὐκ ἔνι
δοῦλος οὐδὲ ἐλεύθερος,
οὐκ ἔνι
ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ·
πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε
ἐν χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.

This is what we call Galatians 3:28. Of course, Paul’s not translating from Hebrew to Greek. Rather his Hebraic Hellene is minimizing any difference in the language. Writing in Greek, he’s sounding Semitic. The emphasis is not on separation but on relation, not on division but on unity. He goes so far to deconstruct any difference that Greek readers might sense in and within the frozen phrase ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ.

The Reception of “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” in Contemporary Sexist Theology

In English translation, the frozen phrase gets used a lot today by people writing about home and church roles. In English, it is “male” / “fe-male” that gets discussed.

Those with a complementarian theological bent like Wayne Grudem, for example, will quote Moses and then Paul writing it. Here’s his emphasis on pages 256-57 and 458-59 of his magnus opus, Systematic Theology:

Because God in himself has both unity and diversity, it is not surprising that unity and diversity are also reflected in the human relationships he has established. We see this first in marriage. When God created man in his own image, he did not create merely isolated individuals, but Scripture tells us, “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). And in the unity of marriage (see Gen. 2:24) we see, not a triunity as with God, but at least a remarkable unity of two persons, persons who remain distinct individuals yet also become one in body, mind, and spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 6:16-20; Eph. 5:31). In fact, in the relationship between man and woman in marriage we see also a picture of the relationship between the Father and Son in the Trinity. Paul says, “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3). Here, just as the Father has authority over the Son in the Trinity, so the husband has authority over the wife in marriage. The husband’s role is parallel to that of God the Father and the wife’s role is parallel to that of God the Son. Moreover, just as Father and Son are equal in deity and importance and personhood, so the husband and wife are equal in humanity and importance and personhood. And, although it is not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, the gift of children within marriage, coming from both the father and the mother, and subject to the authority of both father and mother, is analogous to the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and Son in the Trinity.

But the human family is not the only way in which God has ordained that there would be both diversity and unity in the world that reflect something of his own excellence. In the church we have “many members” yet “one body” (1 Cor. 12:12).

….

Equality in status among God’s people is also emphasized by Paul in Galatians. “For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27-28)

… If human beings are to reflect the character of God, then we would expect some similar differences in roles among human beings, even with respect to the most basic of differences among human beings, the difference between male and female. And this is certainly what we find in the biblical text.

Paul makes this parallel explicit when he says, “I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3). Here is a distinction in authority that may be represented as in figure 22.1.

Just as God the Father has authority over the Son, though the two are equal in deity, so in a marriage, the husband has authority over the wife, though they are equal in personhood. In this case, the man’s role is like that of God the Father, and the woman’s role is parallel to that of God the Son. They are equal in importance but have different roles.

The quotations of Genesis and of Galatians above are from the Revised Standard Version. In Grudem’s most recent book (discussed here at BLT here, here, and here), he quotes the same excerpts but from the English Standard Version that he has so much contributed to. The main alteration with respect to these couple of verses is only for Galatians, where the ESV has “there is no male and female” instead of “there is neither male nor female” of the more literary RSV. Of course, Grudem does not need the literary of the Hebrew Bible or of Paul’s Hebraic Hellene letter. He does not need the phrase “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” as a unity without separation or difference. He needs difference, a hierarchical binary, where “male and fe-male” has the one in the default position as head of household and as leader of the church. The Other he has to have as the complement to the unmarked one. This is God-ordained and is as Natural as the divisions of Aristotle, even a fake Aristotle.