Does God Have a Gender? A Cherokee Perspective

When St. Jerome translated the Greek Bible into Latin, he addressed the question of gender as he crossed the language lines:

In the Gospel of the Hebrews that the Nazarenes read it says, "Just now my mother, the Holy Spirit, took me." Now no one should be offended by this, because "spirit" in Hebrew is feminine, while in our language [Latin] it is masculine and in Greek it is neuter. In divinity, however, there is no gender.

- Jerome's Commentary on Isaiah 11

Being a genderless language, Cherokee addresses these questions differently. The words most often used to address a supreme deity in monotheistic pre-contact Cherokee culture are proper names, which cannot be presented or discussed here. The most common name since contact is Unetlanvhi, translated as apportioner, measurer, or provider. This name is originally associated with the sun goddess, who is also addressed as Red Woman or Beloved Woman. By association, if not by grammar, it can be considered a feminine word.

The Cherokee word, agayvli, can mean "ancestor" or "thousand." The singular word by itself usually means "great-grandmother" or the oldest living matriarch.

A few years ago, a pastor of Cherokee ancestry was trying to include more Cherokee language in her ministry. She came across the command for baptism in Matthew 28:19, "In the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit." The Cherokee New Testament renders it "Dudoa Agayvli, ale Uwetsi, ale Adanvdo Galiquodiyu." She was confused because the word for used for Father, Agayvli, was not one she knew. Looking it up, she was even more confused when the dictionary gave it as "great-grandmother."

I explained that in a matrilineal culture, the female ancestry was superior to the male. "God the Father" had been promoted to "God the Great-Grandmother," so he could have ultimate authority! Any one who has dealt with a Cherokee great-grandmother knows what I'm talking about. As a female pastor, she got a kick out of this.

The word used for Son, Uwetsi, is genderless, and could mean a daughter or the seed of a plant, or the poetic 'seed' meaning a line of descendants. Adanvdo Galiquodiyu, Holy Spirit, is a post-contact construction, and could also be translated as 'Sacred Heart."

The Cherokee were known as the scribes, or record-keepers, or accountants of the Southeast. From our calendar, we know that we dealt with long periods of time and astronomical movements. Agayvli also means "thousand," because the higher numbers were used by the elders and ancestors.

In our stories, we came to earth from the stars, from Heaven. Our ancestors are there, and our oldest ancestor, male or female, is Almighty God. We set a place for them at our tables, a thousand generations of ancestors and a thousand generations of descendants, and we look forward to being reunited with them all someday at the banquet table set for us in Heaven.