The use of anthropos as a feminine

WOLRD Magazine’s blog on the TNIV Stealth Bible has an entry on June 2, 2005, that points to Michael Marlowe’s article on the use of anthropos. A commenter named CSB pointed out that Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ, which is available online through Tufts University’s Perseus) has cited a few examples of anthropos in reference to women. I was going to post the following comment, but WORLD’s blog server had a bug that rejected it as it rejected all others during that time. By the time the server came back in order, Mr. Marlowe had already replied to CSB. Mr. Marlowe is, of course, more knowledge in Greek than I. But with my limited knowledge I could still observe that the feminine uses of anthropos were exceptional. So, instead of posting to WORLD’s blog, I will just put the comment here.

On the other hand, in most of the examples cited by Liddell & Scott (for the feminine sense), the feminine article "he" is used, clearly marking the special use of anthropos as referring to a female human being and sometimes contemptuously to a female slave. In the example where the article is not used, anthropos appears in the phrase tis anthropon. Tis can be grammatically either masculine or feminine, but the context makes it clear that it is used as a feminine.

It must also be kept in mind that the use of anthropos to refer to a female individual is rather rare. One might reasonably suspect a special rhetoric purpose for such usage (e.g., contemptuous reference to female slaves). Thus the burden of proof is still on the gender-neutral party to show that when anthropos is used normally as a masculine noun referring to an individual it might refer to a female person.