“Wither she did go” ??

[Kishkumen]

Oh, the song says "you can't always get what you want" but if I try hard enough I just might. You'd be surprised what people can do. I don't believe it's impossible. I believe in miracles. If I want to be on the moon, I can. I want to visit a distant star, I can. Nothing is impossible when you set your mind to it!

If you really believed in miracles, we probably wouldn’t be having this exchange.

[Shulem]

Oh, the song says "you can't always get what you want" but if I try hard enough I just might. You'd be surprised what people can do. I don't believe it's impossible. I believe in miracles. If I want to be on the moon, I can. I want to visit a distant star, I can. Nothing is impossible when you set your mind to it!

If you really believed in miracles, we probably wouldn’t be having this exchange.

You don't believe me? Are you suggesting that I might be lying or faking my beliefs? We are having this exchange and that's a fact. I believe in miracles and that too is a fact. I absolutely believe in supernatural forces that are above man's ability to explain. I absolutely believe that that mind and spirit can control and change the natural elements in ways that are miraculous.

But all this is leading away from the main point of this thread. Why didn't the Book of Jonah and the the books of Nephi refer to ships in the feminine? The Old Testament gives no thought to Jonah's doomed vessel as being female in nature, just another "it". The vessel that Nephi crafted on the shores of Arabia and set to sea by divine decree was not christened with a special name and did not afford power over the sea accept it be through the male God in whom Nephi worshipped. The voyages of Jonah and Nephi were thus ascribed in the male sense and everything behind the scenes was about the male God in whom they paid tribute.

Nephi never said a word about his fine ship being a her or likening it to a she. Never not once! You will recall that Nephi did not build the ship after the workmanship or manner of men. He claimed to have built a ship after the manner in which the Lord did show him, something extra special and unknown to man at the time. And when the compass failed to work, Nephi "knew not whither they should steer the ship." The ship was the definite article, not a she in which to steer, or not a her that might sink in the depths of the sea. This ship was too good to be called a "she" because it was in Smith's mind a male ship built by the designs of a male God. Thus, "I, Nephi, did guide the ship." The narrative seems to take care not to let the feminine nautical expression slip into the text. It keeps the gender neutral and ascribes all glory to a male God who built a male ship to sail the male sea by the power of a male God. The whole story is patriarchal in every sense.

[Shulem]

So? Lots of literature borrows heavily from other literature.

Shulem is on the prowl!

And it came to pass that they were never heard of more. And we suppose that they were drowned in the depths of the sea. And it came to pass that one other ship also did sail forth; and whither she did go we know not.

Compare:

With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,
Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;
Some lying fast at anchor in the road,
Some veering up and down, one knew not why.
A goodly vessel did I then espy
Come like a giant from a haven broad;
And lustily along the bay she strode,
Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
The ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover's look;
This ship to all the rest did I prefer:
When will she turn, and whither? She will brook
No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:
On went she, and due north her journey took.

And it came to pass that Hagoth, he being an exceedingly curious man, therefore he went forth and built him an exceedingly large ship, on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation, and launched it forth into the west sea, by the narrow neck which led into the land northward.

Bullseye!

[Moksha]

Bullseye!

Like a Spanish Picador divebombing a ship of curious construction shouting, "Toro, Toro, Toro!"

[Shulem]

Bullseye!

Like a Spanish Picador divebombing a ship of curious construction shouting, "Toro, Toro, Toro!"

I have a lot of aces up my sleeve.



Believe me, this board will be rocked and shocked!

Oh, I had a conversation with Reuben Hedlock last night.

[Moksha]

Oh, I had a conversation with Reuben Hedlock last night.

I hope he gave you a snoutful of information.

[Shulem]

Oh, I had a conversation with Reuben Hedlock last night.

I hope he gave you a snoutful of information.

He did. I'm in the know. Wow.

[Shulem]

Compare:

With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,
Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;
Some lying fast at anchor in the road,
Some veering up and down, one knew not why.
A goodly vessel did I then espy
Come like a giant from a haven broad;
And lustily along the bay she strode,
Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
The ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover's look;
This ship to all the rest did I prefer:
When will she turn, and whither? She will brook
No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:
On went she, and due north her journey took.

And it came to pass that Hagoth, he being an exceedingly curious man, therefore he went forth and built him an exceedingly large ship, on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation, and launched it forth into the west sea, by the narrow neck which led into the land northward.

Bullseye!

[Shulem]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't think ancient (600 BC) Jews or ship captains in Israel referred to their vessels using the feminine pronouns of she & her in a literal sense. There is no reason for me to believe that. In fact, I have no reason to believe that women were even allowed to set sail! Show me the evidence! Show me in ancient Jewish literature where ships were named in the feminine sense. Therefore, I see no reason why Nephi would have used that vernacular having taken it to the New World where it would have been passed down to Alma and Mormon. There is nothing in the Book of Mormon that makes me think that their prophets would have referred to seafarers and people aboard ships using terminology of heathen nations on the other side of the world who sought protection from goddesses while asea.

[Symmachus]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't think ancient (600 BC) Jews or ship captains in Israel referred to their vessels using the feminine pronouns of she & her in a literal sense. There is no reason for me to believe that.

The problem here is an over-literal reading of the grammatical terminology "masculine" and "feminine." The use of "she" with ships is not a question of grammar but of usage. As grammatical category, gender only occasionally overlaps with biological gender, and by definition that is only in the case of animate beings in most languages that have masculine/feminine distinction in their nouns. Instead of "masculine" and "feminine," we could use "Category 1" and "Category 2" or use some other scheme. We use "masculine" and "feminine" in grammatical description because of that occasional overlap with biological gender but largely out of tradition; at the head of that tradition were grammarians who were trying to describe their languages to themselves. In trying to classify nouns, they used a very concrete, immediate style of language drawing from their everyday experience (whereas modern people prefer an abstract style and numbers), and so they looked at nouns ending in "a" or whatever and said to themselves, "you know what? All the women I know have names that end in that, so I'm gonna call those 'womanish' nouns." Adjectives modifying them were also "womanish," as were the pronouns. Dr. Steuss is correct about the Hebrew word for ship being feminine, and any pronoun referring to it would also be feminine, as would any adjectives modifying the noun. So, yes, in fact in Hebrew the pronoun referring to a ship would always be "hī" (literally, "she" in English) which is the feminine pronoun, because the word for ship was grammatically feminine. But I think you are absolutely right, Shulem, that the average Hebrew speaker would not have thought of it as literally a feminine object (those Hebrew speakers out there reading this must surely have marveled, as I have, that in Hebrew "he" is she and "who" is he and "me" is who...someone will get that pun). It would be absurd to translate it as "she" then, and certainly you could not do this consistently without sounding ridiculous: every city in such a translation would be a "she," as would the earth, chariots, many abstract concepts, and in general every other feminine noun in Hebrew.

Added to this, the English of Joseph Smith and/or the divine Early Modern English of the Book of Mormon did not have gendered nouns. Grammatical gender has not existed in English nouns for roughly 800 years, depending on the dialect of Early Middle English you are looking at, and even when they did, in the Old English period, the word for "ship" was neuter (although the word for "boat" was variously masculine or feminine), as it still is in German. The modern English use of "she" for ships or other objects is a personfication dating to the eighteenth century, not a reflection of grammatical gender (which English doesn't have, except in pronouns). In other words, it is not a question of something inherent to the language (its grammar) or something that has survived translation from a language with gendered nouns; rather, it is a reflection of how the English language is used (pragmatics), so "she" for "ship" in the Book of Mormon reflects the usage of the translator/composer.

Regarding the question posed about "reformed Egyptian," who knows? We should check Sindarin and Quenya while we're at it. Yet the word for ship in Demotic Egyptian (ḏj) was grammatically masculine, as was that in Late Egyptian (ḏꜣy) that preceded it, although there were other words for water-traveling vessels that were feminine (e.g. ḏꜣt). Interestingly, the English word "barge" ultimately goes back through French, Latin, Greek, and Coptic to the Egyptian word bꜣjr. So there is that for the apologist playpen: another Egyptian connection to the Jaredites alongside "deseret."

Shouldn't we be thinking about Uto-Aztecan though? Unfortunately, I suspect that nouns did not have gender in the Proto-Uto-Aztecan spoken by the Nephites and Lamanites (nouns don't in Classical Nahuatl, Ute, Shoshone, or in Hopi, but I do not know enough about any other U-A languages). As in many languages of Native America (e.g. Algic and Iroquoian languages), animacy vs. inanimacy is the major distinction in nouns, although there also many other oppositional categories that are extremely interesting. So, while the Stubbs thesis would have us believe that Aramaic + Hebrew + Egyptian had effect even on the verbal system, the category of grammatical gender (which all have) had no effect on Proto-Uto-Aztecan, which had noun animacy/inanimacy as well as other noun categories (which Aramaic, Hebrew, and Egyptian do not have).

Oh but perhaps Arabic, which Lehi also must have spoken, had some influence here, since animacy vs. inanimacy is a distinction for noun plurals (noun plurals of inanimate nouns are treated grammatically as feminine singular). And maybe John Robertson could step in to tell us whether nouns in Mayan languages had gender, and whether "ships" were "she." It's not an Uto-Aztecan language but we might find something else to put in the playpen.