The Masculine Language of the Bible: A Response to David Clines

Abstract

In the Ethel M. Wood lecture for 2015, David Clines observed that the Bible is marked by language that carries distinctively male perspectives or values, and that this is not much remarked upon in commentaries. Clines finds scandal in both. The current essay responds to Clines by finding that cultural conceptions of masculinity, not limited to the Bible, but well represented by it, tend to conflate masculinity with virtue. As Roy Baumeister (inter alios) has noted, a man is often perceived not to be fully a man unless he serves his society virtuously, often self-sacrificially. Eight male values proposed by Clines are tested as standards of virtue, and a new ninth is advanced as a more suitable locus for attention.