(aqar, masc.!); Possibilities Beyond Absence
by Cliel Shdaimah
About four years, I took a class in which my peers and I read roughly four chapters of Deuteronomy closely for an entire semester. When preparing a final paper for the class, I chose to focus on verse 7:14 as one with interpretive trans potential. The word עקר (aqar, meaning barrenness) appears twice in the verse, and for the first and only time in the Hebrew Bible, with a masculine form. I had been hoping to find a commentary or interpretive legs to stand on with regards to a trans-ish understanding. However, there was instead a lacuna, an absence, regarding the strange word as well as the verse itself. The paper I wrote, and have now reworked for the Disability Torah Project, reviews the limited secondary and tertiary material on Deut. 7:14. Here, I conclude with some thoughts for the future, and a hope for further expansive, imaginative, queer and queerish Torah interpretation which takes seriously the endless body possibilities that there are.
Fertility and related issues are common and complex in the Hebrew Bible. The ways in which these issues arise in narratives and laws, and then in legal and narrative discourse, prioritize a biologically essentializing understanding of the human body. Parashat eikev, in which Moses continues his speech to the People of Israel includes a discussion of fertility along expectations of obeying and keeping the commandments in return for God’s blessing. One verse stands out to me and will be the focus of this d’var torah:
ברוך תהיה מכל–העמים לא–יהיה בך עקר ועקרה ובבהמתך:
You shall be blessed above all peoples; there will be no barren male or female among you, or your livestock. (Deut. 7:14)[1]
Here, I want to focus on the phrase עקר ועקרה (aqar v’aqarah) meaning ‘barren male or female.’ Normally, and relatively surface-level-y, the word/root aqar is conceived of differently for male and female: impotent/sterile and barren respectfully. This interpretive gendered translation assumes the biological make-up of an individual based on which gendered ending would be attributed to them. Aqar means ‘infertile, with no descendants: woman’ and its unvoweled root means ‘to tear the roots out, weed.’[2] In the Hebrew Bible, aqar only seems to occur “where it means barren,” specifically, female, or “of women” barrenness.[3] The only time the Hebrew Bible describes male barrenness with this word is Deuteronomy 7:14, “indica[ing] fertility or impotence – especially if male impotence was imaged to the he functional partner to female infertility.”[4]
Though it is relevant, I am not pursuing an interpretive lens with regards to infertility as disability for this d’var. Often interpretation of in/fertility in the text understands it as a “form of a curse or punishment [and those] whose fertility is specially marked by having overcome barrenness with divine assistance” are righteous.[5] These interpretations lend themselves to curse/cure notions of disability which are ableist and dangerous. I think it is important to re-interpret these instances of narrative/divine intervention towards more affirming notions and languages.
For now, I want to focus on the interpretive construction which assumes bioessentialism on a text where a word is used in equal measure for ‘both’ genders. Deut. 7:14 offers a singular moment in which the word for barren is gendered masculine. When attempting to translate ‘male barrenness,’ phrases such as ‘sterility’ or ‘impotence’ are normal interpretive moves. From a cisnormative perspective, male and female barrenness includes: the inability of female and male bodies to participate in reproduction including, but not limited to the womb, ovaries, testes, and hormone production. From an expansive point of view, any of these in/abilities might be relevant for anyone given their individual body, bodily functions, and personal identity. My interest is in breaking away from that kind of word-work and attempting more all-encompassing understandings of what we might understand within the potential of aqar v’aqarah. And, while I think there’s a lot here to bite into, commonly referenced commentary and interpretation do not reflect that.
In rabbinic commentary, aqar is used in reference to men. For example, in b. Yevamot, Rabbi Nahman explains that Yitzhak was infertile when questions regarding his entreaty to God for Rivka arise. From this develops a bit of a tangent, in which Yitzhak is compared to Avraham, implying that he was also infertile. Several lines later, a midrash is referenced in which Avraham and Sarah are understood as tumtumim, meaning they had “concealed and nonfunctional sexual organs.”[6] There are other instances in which rabbinic/midrashic connections are made between pregnancy strangeness and non-binary gender attribution. For example, Adam and Eve, upon their creation, might have been androgynous, posing both/all sexual characteristics.[7] This can be a way to understand Gen. 1:27 where ונקבה ברא אתם ‘male and female, [They] created them’ by extending it to mean the first human(s) were created with all gender and body possibilities at once. There are also ways of interpreting the first humans as ‘genderless mass’/glamim based on Pslams 139:16.[8] Even without rabbinic interpretation, there are many ways to understand the creation of humanity with or without the reliance on a binary gender.
Despite this rabbinic openness to possibility regarding the p/matriarchs, when it comes to Deut. 7:14, there seems to be no question at all about what the masculine aqar is referring to in commentary. Rashi’s singular comment on the verse is: “שאינו מוליד,” interpreting the word as “a man who cannot procreate,” with others following his lead for the most part.[9] Beyond rabbinic discourse, there are only a handful of treatments of this strange word.
Dalit Rom-Shiloni, in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, notes that in Deut. 7:13, the word for womb, בטנך betnecha, is in a masculine singular: “Are men imaged having wombs, or more darkly, as owning women’s wombs?”[10]However, regarding the verse in question, she does not ask the same questions of aqar but rather understands it broadly that all people can celebrate pregnancy and birth.[11] Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin, in her chapter of The Women’s Torah Commentary regarding Ekev, discusses v.13 as well, asking “How can a male, who has no uterus, and no potential for carrying a child within him, comprehend this experience? … only by taking that extra leap of imagination will he be able to apply this female yearning for the care of this baby within her to his relationship with God as well.”[12] Ruskin uses this to rethink the metaphor of circumcision for women to see themselves in the lines which appear later in the parashah rather than feel alienated by them.[13] Both Rom-Shiloni and Ruskin present a binary way of thinking about men and women’s bodies and do not engage with the potentials of v.14 though they seem to set themselves up for the trans possibility of it.
I have chosen not to delineate the queer commentaries and interpretations for parashat eikev – that is not because they do not exist, but because the ones that I found during my writing process in 2021 did not offer a discussion on the potentials for expanding upon aqar. If there are some that exist that I have not come across, I would be so excited to read them!
So, after all this: is there room to imagine endless possibilities for barrenness, in which one’s body, whether cis/trans male, cis/trans female, intersex, or any other form, can fit within what aqar can stand for? I believe that there is. In an imagined utopia in which the children of Israel keep and obey God’s commandments and are therefore blessed with all they can be blessed with, that blessing must involve all forms of non-barrenness for every person. This means that transwomen who did not have wombs can form them, and transmen without testes can develop a set. This means that anyone who has trouble with in/fertility will be blessed the possibility they want for their reproductive processes. And also there would be no negativity for those who do not want to participate in procreation. Reading aqar v’aqarah in this way provides possibilities dismantle social or political opportunity for ableism to infect notions regarding bodily in/fertility. Within utopic, divinely-blessed mechanisms for any kind of reproductive experience, the overachieving and policing notion of ‘able’ ceases to have a function.
Disability Torah and Queer Torah are intertwined; it is through radical intentional expansion and unapologetic imagination that we create inclusive Torah for anyone. Perhaps playing with ‘semantic’ nuances of a single word in a single text seems relatively small and insufficient, but it is in these things that we refine and craft tools of interpretation and practice that prioritize our bodies and needs and experiences.
[1] Translation mine, though it resembles other available translations of course.
[2] HALOT, https://accordance.bible/link/read/HALOT#14081
[3] TDOT 332.; BDB, 785.
[4] Candita Moss and Joel S. Baden. Reconceiving Fertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 38.
[5] Moss and Baden, 12.
[6] b. Yevamot 64a:9
[7] Such as: b. Eruvin 19a and Gen. Rabba 8:1
[8] Gen. Rabba 8:1. The word in the Psalm: גלמי galmi is, like aqar masc., anomalous. It is a hapax legomenon meaning that it only appears in the Hebrew Bible in this instance. It is a word that gets used in later traditions and is tied to our favorite Jewish monster: the Golem.
[9] Rashi on Deuteronomy 7:14; There is one small stand out in that Mizrachi, commenting on Rashi’s commentary in the 16thcentury, explicates ‘שאינו מוליד’ in a way that implies that both ‘he’ or ‘she’ cannot give birth or, perhaps, beget children. I do not think that this commentator believes that men can give birth to babies, but it does leave some interesting opportunities for word-play if desired.
[10] Dalit Rom-Shiloni, “Eikev 7:12-11:25; Conditions for Life in the Land,” The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, eds. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea Weiss, (NY: Women of Reform Judaism; URJ Press, 2008),1110.
[11] Rom-Shiloni, “Eikev,” 1110.
[12] Gila Colman Ruskin, “Parashat Ekev: Circumcision, Womb, and Spiritual Intimacy,” The Women’s Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions. (Woodstock, VT; Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000), 349.
[13] Ruskin, “Parashat Ekev,” 350.
Works Cited
Botterweck, Johannes G. Helmer Ringren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry (ed.) Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. XI. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971-2021.
Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden. Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015
Driver, S. R.. A critical and exegetical commentary on Deuteronomy. New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1909.
Frankel, Ellen. The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah. New York, G. P. Putnam’s 1996.
Rom-Shiloni, Dalit. “Eikev 7:12-11:25; Conditions for life in the land.” The Torah a woman’s commentary. (ed. by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andraw Weiss) New York, Women of Reform Judaism, Federation of Temple Sisterhood: URJ Press, 2008.
Ruskin, Rabbi Gila Colman. “Prashat Ekev: Circumcision, Womb, and Spiritual Intimacy” The Women’s Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions. Woodstock, V.T., Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000.
Cliel Shdaimah, she/hers, is a second-year PhD student who studies queer reception of Jewish sacred texts. Her specific interest is the narratives which center marginalized embodiment and how they can be understood in our contemporary moment. Cliel works as a Grade 8 teacher at a pluralistic shul and has run educational program for Jewish adults regarding art and Torah. She parts torah related art on instagram and spends a lot of time reading, crocheting, and writing.
