Androgynos

The word is Greek, not Hebrew. It joins anēr, man, to gynē, woman, and Moses Gaster, writing the Jewish Encyclopedia article, took the Greek form as evidence that the notion arrived from Hellenic sources rather than growing inside the tradition. The alternative Greek term, hermaphrodite, never occurs in rabbinic writing at all.

What the word meant before the rabbis used it

In ordinary ancient Greek the word first described effeminate men, and Herodotus applies it to a Scythian fortune teller. Plato put it to a new use in the Symposium, where Aristophanes tells of three original kinds of round, four-limbed, two-faced beings, male, female and the union of the two, who were split by Zeus and have been looking for their halves ever since. Only the halves of the andrógynoi seek the opposite sex, which is what the myth exists to explain. Plato's Aristophanes also remarks that in his own day androgynos was used only as an insult, meaning an effeminate man or a coward, so the pejorative sense and the philosophical one were already running side by side.

How the myth and the ruling stayed apart

Rabbinic literature keeps the mythical figure and the legal one apart, in the aggadah and the halakhah respectively. Genesis Rabbah records Rabbi Yirmeya ben Elazar holding that the first human was created an androgynos, reading the verse in Genesis that says male and female He created them, while Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani holds instead that the first human was double-faced and was sawn apart. In the Talmud proper it is Shmuel's version that prevails, and Gaster notes that in the halakhic material only androgynos is used and never the double-faced term.

The resemblance to Plato was noticed early and used against the Jews. Church fathers wrote to refute what Augustine treated as a Jewish fable, and Strabo classed the idea among the damnatae Judaeorum fabulae; Sixtus Senensis gave it a chapter of the Bibliotheca Sacra in a Cologne edition of 1586. Eusebius argued the influence had run the other way, from Genesis to Plato, which Wikipedia records as a misunderstanding.

Why the androgynos was a legal problem

Halakhah was built for a population of men and women, and applying it to someone in neither class required a ruling on every point. The Mishnah works through them. Like a man, an androgynos dresses as a man, is obligated in all the commandments, marries women, and transmits impurity through white emissions. Like a woman, an androgynos does not share in an inheritance as sons do, does not eat the sacrifices reserved for men, and transmits impurity through red discharge. Like anybody at all, one who strikes or curses an androgynos is liable, and one who kills an androgynos is a murderer. Unlike either, an androgynos is not liable for entering the Temple in a state of impurity.

The category also appears on the list of those exempt from appearing at the Temple for the three pilgrimage festivals, alongside the Tumtum, women, unemancipated slaves, minors and the sick. My Jewish Learning notes that the rabbis handled analogous problems elsewhere without difficulty, classing the koi as an animal between wild and domesticated and the etrog as something between a fruit and a vegetable, on the understanding that most categories describe the world imperfectly. The term appears thirty-two times in the Mishnah and two hundred and eighty-three times in the Talmud, and the great majority of those passages are rulings rather than retellings of the myth.

How the Greek myth travelled after antiquity

The philosophical strand had a long second life that had nothing to do with halakhah. Marsilio Ficino's Latin Symposium and his commentary De amore brought Aristophanes' speech back into western European reading for the first time since antiquity, and Ficino avoided the word androgyn and read the three kinds as three sorts of soul. Judah Leon Abravanel tied the myth to Genesis again in Dialoghi d'amore in 1535. Antoine Héroet's L'Androgyne de Platon, published in 1542, ran to fifteen editions by 1568 and made the idea courtly, so much so that by the middle of that century French speakers were calling a spouse their half. Bonaventure des Périers took up the punishment of the ball-people in Blason du nombril in 1550, and Pietro Bembo used the figure in Gli Asolani.

The English adjective arrives on the same current. Etymonline dates androgyne to the mid twelfth century from Medieval Latin, androgynal to the 1640s, and androgynous to the 1620s in the sense of womanish, said of a man, with the sense of having both sexes following in the 1650s.

Why the modern reading is contested

My Jewish Learning presents the rabbinic categories as seven gender designations and notes that queer Jews and allies have in recent decades reread them as a space for nonbinary Jews in the tradition. It is careful about what the rabbis were doing: they were not using gender in the modern sense of a construct distinct from sex, and the seven categories are distinguished by physical facts. The article's own framing is that the reclamation is a project undertaken now, on material that does something else. What the sources agree on is narrower and harder to argue with: the tradition knew that not everybody fitted the two classes its law was written for, and it wrote the exceptions down in detail rather than ignoring them. That the word also lies behind the modern English vocabulary of androgyny is a fact about Greek, not evidence that the categories are the same.