Answer: Firstly, it
should be kept in mind that we have no knowledge whatsoever
about the physical being of God; we do not know if He is male,
female, genderless or has some other gender that we are not
aware of.
Secondly, in spite of
not knowing what God’s gender is, since humans had to address
God, some gender had to be adopted.
If these two points
are clear, then one can go on to consider another fact: the
concept of God was found in the very first human beings – Adam
and Eve. With their birth, languages were born. We have no
knowledge about what language our progenitors spoke, nor do we
know what languages were spoken by much later generations.
Anyway, as time progressed various languages were born and in
them was born the concept of gender. Even things were
classified as either male or female. For example, in the
English language, the female gender was adopted for a entity
“country.” So we now say: “Nepal is a poor country; her
resources are scarce.” This of course does not make the
country a female. Likewise, the expression
“sister-organizations” refer to similar organizations.
Similarly, in the Arabic language, the nouns shams (sun),
sa‘ir (Hell) and sama (sky) are feminine. Why? Simply because
Englishmen and Arabs used to speak this way. Likewise, the
male gender was adopted for God. Again not because God is “a
male” but because of the usage of the language. So consistent
was this usage that in most languages, the male gender was
reserved for God.
So you see with this
history, one can safely conclude that genders of things and
entities (except for men and women and other species whose
gender is physically known), all genders are fixed by the
usage of a language and have nothing to do with the actual
gender of the thing.
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