The Torah has some compliments for Yoseif in this week’s portion. Not only is he good at running a household, he’s also nice to look at. That’s almost literally what the text says in Bəreishit 39:6, where we read that Yoseif was יְפֵה תֹֽאַר וִיפֵה מַרְאֶה | yəfeih tó’ar vifeih mar’eh | “beautiful of shape and beautiful of sight”.

Translations get a bit swimmy here because these two phrases are so similar to one another — tó’ar and mar’eh aren’t all that clearly differentiated from one another; they both basically mean “something looked at”. The point, tho, is clear: Yoseif is easy on the eyes.

If you’ve been reading the Torah in the original Hebrew this cycle, this little descriptive clause might sound familiar. Indeed, it’s the exact same clause (other than a tweak of grammatical gender) that gets used to describe Yoseif’s mother, Raḥeil, in 29:17 — Ya’aqov’s favored wife is described there as יְפַת תֹּֽאַר וִיפַת מַרְאֶה | yəfat tó’ar vifat mar’eh | “beautiful of shape and beautiful of sight”.

You could be excused for not knowing this if you’ve been reading along in English instead. There’s a real resistance among English translators to translate these two identical clauses identically. Sefaria hosts twelve English translations of Genesis, and of those twelve, only one — the 1917 JPS translation (not any of the later JPS editions!) — uses the same English clause both times. Adding Robert Alter’s version brings us slightly up to two out of thirteen, but the KJV, Yale Anchor Bible, and Oxford Annotated Bible versions push us back down to two in sixteen. It’s a strong, clear, and persistent pattern: Almost every English translation I have access to masculinizes Yoseif with adjectives like handsome and well built while feminizing Raḥeil with adjectives like shapely and beautiful.

Now, a good translation usually shouldn’t be entirely mechanical. Natural language isn’t formal logic — words are fuzzy, and no two languages’ words are all fuzzy in exactly the same way. The English word set can be used of going down (as the sun below the horizon) and also of a collection of things (as in chess pieces). That’s not going to be the case in every other language; when translating out of English, it’s often necessary to use two different words to capture these two different meanings. Even in less extreme cases, the same word may sometimes be best translated differently depending on context, nuance, and valence. This can get very tricky if a text is using the same word in different senses to make a pun or a point or for some other artistic, philosophical, or idiosyncratic reason — if I say, “Zie couldn’t be elected because of hir convictions”, I may mean both hir beliefs and hir having been found guilty in a court of law [a], which is going to be difficult to translate succinctly into a language that doesn’t have a singular word with that same double meaning. Different translators make different choices and tradeoffs in navigating issues like this, and that’s one of the things that makes different translations interestingly different. That’s all well and good.

[a] Or even hir having found guilty in a court of law because of hir beliefs!

Nevertheless, I struggle to believe that these kinds of considerations are driving this pattern of differentiated translation. The clause in question is long enough to be its own self-contained grammatical thought; it doesn’t need to change to fit the syntax of the sentence around it. And in neither case is there punning wordplay going on; these words were doubtless chosen specifically, but all signs point to that choice being based on sense, not sound.

And that sense seems like it could well be important. We know Ya’aqov loves Raḥeil more than his other wives, just as we know he loves Yoseif more than his other sons. In both cases, this preference leads to problems, with rivalry, deception, and a long sojourn in a foreign land ensuing. And here we have Yoseif described with the exact same set of words as his mother. It’s a linguistic linkage that’s easy enough to preserve in translation. So why not keep it?

יָפֶה | Yafeh is an adjective that just means beautiful. It comes from a root that also just means beautiful. It’s not a particularly specialized type of beauty — it’s used of women and men, sure, but also of cities and trees and even, in Qohélet 3:11, of abstract things in their proper times. It’s not wrong to translate it as handsome, but neither is it obligatory to do so when yafeh is applied to a man.

These differing translations are not linguistically required. Instead, they reflect a retrojection of a contemporary gender framework back onto a text that doesn’t fully support it. The Torah is, to be sure, a deeply patriarchal document, but that doesn’t mean its patriarchal gender norms function identically to ours. The near unanimity of English translations in masculinizing Yoseif’s beautiful while feminizing Raḥeil’s betrays a deep discomfort with men and women being alike. I doubt this was a conscious thing for the most part, but the prior belief that men and women should be linguistically distinguished distorts the translations, occluding the identicality of the Hebrew text. A distinction between genders isn’t being found here, it’s being built.

Many people would have you believe that gender is a natural phenomenon, that differences between men and women are not created but discovered, things somehow baked into the fabric of the world and then subsequently reflected in culture at large. But here we can see very directly the work going on in the background to maintain this illusion. These differing descriptions of masculine vs feminine beauty aren’t in the original text; they’re not a Hebrew phenomenon dutifully carried over into contemporary English; they’re an invention, pushed onto the text after the fact.