On God's Pronouns: A Speculation

Thinking Out Loud

A long time ago there was nothing, and then there was something, and the entity that created that something where there was nothing is what we call, in english, God. 

There is one God, and God is one. The universe is not the product of conflict or opposing forces, sun gods against moon gods, fertility gods against gods of famine, but is the product of one will and one first cause, that which we call God. In the words of the Rambam:

We believe that this Primal Cause [God] is One. [His is] not like the oneness of a pair, nor like the oneness of a species, nor like man, whose complex oneness may be divided into many units, nor like the oneness of a simple body, which is one in number but may be divided and separated without end. Rather, He is One with a Oneness that knows no parallel in any manner. This is the Second Principle, as affirmed by the verse (Deut. 6:4): "Hear O Israel, God is our Lord, God is One."

There is one God, who creates and sustains and controls all. He creates light and darkness, heaven and earth, land and sea, sun and moon. All binaries collapse in the face of God’s unity, a Oneness that knows no parallel in any manner. 

This is difficult for humans to comprehend, who tend to think in binaries and oppositions. Good/bad, Us/Them, Male/Female. And attempts to comprehend the multifaceted but unified nature of God have tended to confuse the facets as gods in of themselves, which leads to polytheism, paganism, and a worldview in which the defining feature of the universe is not unity but conflict.¹ God is kivaycahol in the place where binaries and oppositions are no longer in conflict but are in equilibrium

In the development of civilization, those who were best at conflict, not just winning it but provoking it, tended to rule the day. These people tended to be men, members of the warrior class, who took themselves wives from whoever they chose, eventually becoming heroes, then legends, then gods. These gods proliferate until a whole pantheon evolves, each civilization having its own conception of the universe in which conflict is a given. Thus, concurrent to the development of polytheism was the development of hierarchy, with the first hierarchy being that of gender in the form of patriarchy.

Essentially, the moment polytheism is created is when man divides God into masculine and feminine instead of perceiving the transcendence of God beyond such a binary, which is also the moment that gender hierarchy is created. We live in a world in which the masculine aspect of God has taken precedence, but only because of the hierarchy created by the splitting of God into masculine and feminine, a task carried out by the creation of hierarchy through patriarchy.