I first wrote a version of this some years ago on my now-deleted Twitter account.

If you open up a Torah scroll to Bəreishit chapter 24, verse 16 — a verse describing Rivqah in her first narrative appearance — you’ll find a chunk of text that starts: והנער טבת מראה מאד. I’m going to hold off on transliterating and translating that for just one moment as a reminder that Torah scrolls are written without any of the little lines and dots indicating what the vowels are. Indeed, those vowel marks are a later addition; pinning them all down precisely and figuring out how and where to write them was a centuries-long process that only wrapped up in the 900s AD. (The vowels would always have been pronounced when reading Torah out loud, of course, but as Biblical Hebrew receded further and further from being a living language and the sacrality of the text demanded greater and greater accuracy, you can see how not having any authoritative written record of the vowels would eventually produce an intolerable anxiety that would have to be rectified.)

The expected way to transliterate and translate that little Hebrew clause would be as follows: vəhaná’ar tovat mar’eh mə’od | “and the young man was very nice to look at”, with the untranslatable wrinkle that “nice to look at” is grammatically feminine.

I call it a wrinkle, but in Hebrew it’s closer to a derailment: Following normative grammar rules, נַֽעַר | ná’ar | “young man” is grammatically masculine, and can’t take grammatically feminine adjectives. It’s a little bit like writing “she am pretty” in formal English; the grammatical parts aren’t clicking together the way they’re normatively expected to. And so in a copy of the Torah that’s printed with all the vowel signs and editorial marks, you’ll find this corrected to וְהַנַּעֲרָה טֹבַת מַרְאֶה מְאֹד | vəhana’arah tovat mar’eh mə’od | “and the young woman was very nice to look at” [a]. Which, fine. This isn’t the only place that the consonantal text seems to have a typo that gets corrected in editions that print the vowels.

[a] Extremely pedantic note: Some of these vowel-marked editions write vəhana’arah as וְהַנַּעֲרָ, without the final ה. These are essentially equivalent, but the gematria I’m going to get into requires the longer spelling. That’s what my edition prints, and so that’s what I developed this dəvar around. I only realized this wasn’t a universal choice when sitting down to write this up more formally here. We live and learn!

Except this isn’t the only time in this section where the consonantal text seems to refer to Rivqah as a ná’ar instead of a na’arah. Indeed, it happens five times in fairly short succession. More than that, every instance of that word is printed in the consonantal text as ná’ar; there are no instances where the consonants refer to Rivqah as a na’arah here. Which starts to make this feel a little less like a typo and more like a choice.

Now, I’m sure there are some academic Biblical Hebrew scholars who will explain that it was normal under some conditions to write the feminine form as the masculine without the final ה, but I’m not reading this as an academic Biblical Hebrew scholar, I’m reading this as a transsexual Jew. And as a transsexual Jew, there are absolutely no obstacles to taking the text as given and reading Rivqah as a young man who sometimes uses grammatically feminine adjectives and verbs [b].

[b] And, indeed, many trans people alternate the grammatical masculine and feminine when describing themselves in Modern Hebrew. It’s such a common practice that it has a standard name, tho my Modern Hebrew isn’t remotely good enough to look it up in this moment.

I think this is positively delightful. We’re meeting the second matriarch, the last to be the sole keeper of the family line, and he’s a genderweird femboy twink. Wonderful! And, what’s more, her entire family is chill with whatever gender is happening here — when they talk about Rivqah, they also call him a young man. It’s not a big deal; sometimes the marriageable daughter of the house is a guy, but whatever, he’ll still make a fine match someday, and is a joy to have around the house in the meantime [c].

[c] I think there are a lot of ways you can read this gender-weirdness in terms of contemporary gender and sex categories, especially in dialogue ancient midrashim that frame Yitzḥaq as also being some flavor of trans. I’m not the only one to take this typographical feature of Ḥayei Sarah and run with it in a gender-queering direction; there is a rich vein of expansively gendered readings of this story if you want to dig deeper into these ideas.

I’ve encountered a degree of resistance to this reading from certain quarters. It’s one thing to imagine Rivqah as a young man in the confines of your own head, these people say, or maybe to mention it in a footnote, but only if you cede that it’s an unsupported reading-into of a text that doesn’t actually mean this; only if you cede that the text — in its original intentions, to its original audience — means what it has been “corrected” to say.

And, sure, maybe that’s what this text meant to folks 2,500 years ago [d], but that’s a very secular argument, and I’m reading this text as a Jew. And Jewish tradition is very clear that when the text of the Torah was given at Mt Sinai, the soul of every Jew who ever was or ever will be was there to receive it. From a Jewish perspective, we are all the original audience for this text, it is ours as much as it is the Bronze Age Israelites’. And Jewish tradition is rich with interpretations of Torah that treat this text not as a product of a specific time and place that can only be understood in relation to that context, but as a set of letters and words that mean whatever they can be analyzed to mean. Hileil proves that some Passover preparations can override Shabbat because two verses describing the ritual calendar both happen to say something should be done “at its time” [e]. Rabbi Yirməyah ben El’azar argues that Adam spent 130 years spawning demons because Bəreishit 5:3 says that at the age of 130 he begat a son “in his image” [f]. Famously, Rabbi Yirməyah cuts a “don’t” out of Shəmot 23:2’s command against majority rule to prove that halakhic decisions should follow a majority [g]. Fidelity to the academically reconstructed original meaning of the Torah has never been a universally requisite principle of Jewish exegesis. If the consonantal text says ná’ar, that’s fair game to accept and explore.

[d] But also: Maybe not! It’s not like it’s hard to find Bronze Age myths from the Ancient Near East in which considerable amounts of Gender Creativity occur.
[e] Pəsaḥim 66b
[f] Eruvin 18b
[g] Bava Mətzi’a 59b — this is part of the oven of akhnai sequence

I don’t think it’s a mystery where this resistance is coming from. I think it’s a transparent manifestation of the phenomenon where straight readings of a text — however strained — are seen as natural, sensible, so obvious as to barely need argument while queer readings — however textually rooted — are wild, implausible, always already on an evidentiary back foot [h].

[h] For a greatly expanded discussion of this phenomenon, check out Erin Horákóva’s phenomenal “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift” from the 10 April, 2017, issue of Strange Horizons.

I think this is a phenomenon we must resist. And I think there is a reminder of the necessity of that resistance in this very parashah. I noted above that there are five times in this section of text where נַֽעַר | ná’ar | “young man” is corrected to נַעֲרָה | na’arah | “young woman” by adding a ה on to the end. That letter is the fifth of the Hebrew alphabet, so together these five gender-straightening emendations have a gematria of 25. This value is shared by the verb דָּכָא | dakha, which means to crush, shatter, or oppress.

When we force these five emendations onto the text, we crush the gender-expansive potential out of it. When we insist Rivqah could not have been a young man, we join the long and sorry history of cissexist oppression. When we reject genderqueer readings as non-textual, we shatter the links of the living tradition between ourselves and the wondrously playful midrashic past. This must never be.

Ben Bag Bag said to turn the Torah over, and then turn it over again, because everything is in it (Pirqei Avot 5:22). Surely that everything includes legendary, foundational gender-weird femboy twinks.