The following, from Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer’s 2017 article, “A New Look at the Biological Sex/Grammatical Gender of Jonah’s Fish,” should add some food for thought vis-a-via the “sons” vs. “things” reading in 2 Nephi 8:19 (= Isa 51:19) as well as the reading one finds in the Great Isaiah Scroll:
(Grammatical) Gender
Ambiguity Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible
Jonah’s fish is not alone among
animals depicted in the Hebrew Bible to display a certain ambiguity with regard
to their biological sex / grammatical gender. Most pertinently, the expression שתים
דבים , which refers to the two bears in the Elisha story (2 Kgs 2:24), shows at
least some form of gender ambiguity, given the feminine form of the numeral ( שתים
) in conjunction with the masculine plural noun ( דבים ). Yet, in view of the
accompanying 3f.pl. verb ,ותצאנה the text speaks about female bears. In contrast,
the LXX uses the non-specific ἄρκος and accordingly does not differentiate
between masculine and feminine bears.4 Looking at the function of the bears
within the narrative of 2 Kgs 2:23-25, Julie Faith Parker detects in their
feminine sex a potential ironic twist “as mother bears who protect their own
cubs now tear apart human offspring." (Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, “A New Look at
the Biological Sex/Grammatical Gender of Jonah’s Fish,” Vetus Testamentum 67,
no. 2 [2017]: 308-9)
