מַכֵּ֥ה אִ֛ישׁ וָמֵ֖ת מ֥וֹת יוּמָֽת׃
One who fatally strikes another shall be put to death.
(The above rendering comes from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation. Before accounting for this rendering, I will analyze the plain sense of the Hebrew term אִישׁ, by employing a situation-oriented construal as outlined in this introduction, pp. 11–16.)
Here the situating noun אִישׁ labels the essential party whose involvement defines the situation of interest: the victim. It is a prototypical usage, pointing our attention to the situation—and then to its implications.
And אִישׁ is used to refer to a category of persons, rather than a specific individual. Such references, by their nature, do not exclude women from their scope (Stein 2008; Stein 2013).
In terms of societal norms, both men and women are in view. Compare the general stricture against human bloodshed in Gen. 9:5–6, couched in terms of אָדָם: any human being. I find no evidence that the text’s ancient audience would assume that women were excluded as victims here.
Jonah ibn Janah’s classic dictionary of biblical Hebrew (written in Arabic as Kitab al-Utsul, ca. 1030; transl. Judah ibn Tibbon as Sefer ha-Shorashim in 1171) cited this verse as the exemplar of gender-inclusive denotations of אִישׁ: “in this instance it includes male and female.” So also Kühlewein in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, eds. Jenni and Westermann (1971/1997), s.v. “whoever (in the generalized meaning ‘person’.”
Thus we have no warrant to translate in gendered terms.
As for rendering into English, the NJPS “a man” nowadays restricts gender unduly. (In contrast, in 1962 when the NJPS Torah was first published, “man” was still commonly used generically in American legal texts.) To avoid the likely misreading of “a man” as indicating a male only, I render more generically.
Although English nowadays lacks a situating noun that is gender-inclusive, we have recourse to the relational pronoun ‘another’, which implicitly references the same situation. (NJPS likewise represented אִישׁ in English by “another” in Deut 19:16; cf. Lev 19:20.)