Translation choice · documented · Feminine
What the source reads — Noadiah ha-neviah — הַנְּבִיאָה, 'the prophetess': the Hebrew form is unmistakably feminine, a woman among the prophets
What this version reads — Noadiae prophetae — the Vulgate gives her the masculine 'prophet', making the woman a man (so too the Septuagint, tō prophētē, and Martini's 'Noadia profeta')
Nehemiah names those who opposed him, among them 'the prophetess Noadiah' — the Hebrew nevi'ah is feminine beyond doubt. Two verses earlier, at Judges' Deborah, the Vulgate wrote prophetis and kept her female; here it writes prophetae, the masculine, and Noadiah becomes a male prophet. The Septuagint had already done it, and Martini's Italian inherits it as 'profeta'. An Old-Testament Junia: a named woman prophet quietly unsexed in the Greek and Latin line, kept female in the Hebrew and the vernaculars that followed it.
Read this chapter side by side — Nehemiah 6:14 →