God as Mother
God is here shown as being like a woman in childbirth:
Isaiah 42:14 I have been silent a long time. I have been quiet and restrained myself. Now I will cry out like a travailing woman. I will both gasp and pant.
The latter part of the following verse clearly refers to the female role in procreation, and in the Hebrew it alludes not only to giving birth but to the pain involved:
Deuteronomy 32:18 You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth (English Standard Version, emphasis mine).
The first part of this verse is often believed to refer to the male role in procreation, and the Hebrew is capable of that meaning. A. D. H. Mayes, however, points out that the word usually means bore, and if that is what is meant here, then this part of the verse is also female imagery.
This refers to God giving birth:
Psalms 90:2 Before the mountains were born, before you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
The Hebrew translated 'born' (some translations give such renderings as you had formed) means primarily to be in pangs with child, to bear a child. (Reference)
Scripture gives other hints of the imagery of God giving birth.
Moses probably meant in the following that God had given birth to the Israelites and that it was therefore Gods duty to mother them.
Numbers 11:12 Have I conceived all this people? Have I brought them out, that you should tell me, Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing infant, to the land which you swore to their fathers?
In the original Greek of the following, gave birth might possibly be capable of sufficient stretching to apply to the male role in procreation. It is, nevertheless, primarily a feminine, maternal term so much so that some radical Bible scholars have wrongly claimed the writer of this letter believed in a different God to that of other writers of Scripture. This argument disintegrates in the face of all the Old Testament precedents in applying to God both maternal and masculine terms.
James 1:18 Of his own will he gave birth to us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
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