In our house at the moment we have a surfeit of ants. This made me think of two rather interesting things:
1. I don't know of anyone else other than me who would knowingly use the word surfeit.
and
2. This - Proverbs 6:6: Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.
The first major scientific study of ants was made by a Mr Auguste Forel who was a Swiss biologist who wrote a treatise on ants called Les fourmis de la Suisse (The Ants of Switzerland) in 1874, but it wasn't until 1910 that an American entomologist called William Morton Wheeler first wrote in the peer-reviewed academic journal Science of his theory that ants were mostly female. Testing of ant hormones and tests under the microscope confirmed this, much to the great delight of an increasing field of Myrmecologists.
Proverbs 6:6 and the surrounding verses pose an interesting problem. Namely that the phrasing of Hebrew words in Proverbs 6:6-8 is entirely female. The word drki·e means "her ways" rather than his ways.
How could the writer possibly know given the fact that it took both chemical testing and a microscope to determine that most ants are female*? Did the ancients have some sort of mystical thing that we don't know about? Or is it just possible that the Bible actually has been inspired by God?
*Moreover, why does the NIV in an effort to be "gender neutral" make the change from "her" to "its" when the writers never intended this to be? Is the NIV being "white-anted"?
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