Feminine biblical imagery for God and Jesus freezes conservatives like Bambi in the headlights, but it is irrefutably abundant and significant. Though my case does not need it, some might find it helpful to ground this feminine imagery in the foundational biblical teaching about God's nature found in Moses' call in the Burning Bush:
"Moses said to God: "If I come to the Israelites...and they ask me, "What is His name?" what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses: "I will be what I will be (or in the same sense, "I am who I am")." He said further: " Thus you shall say to the Israelites, I am has sent me to you (Exodus 3:13-14).'"
The NRSV notes: The future tense is modeled in the introduction of the Yahweh name in Exodus 33:19: "I will proclaim the name Yahweh, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy."
God's reply to Moses has 3 implications :
(1) God continues His habit of being evasive about His name, just as God is similarly evasive about His name to Jacob in Genesis 32:29 and to Samson's parents in Judges 13:18-19.
(2) God wants to be known by God's gracious acts, not by a name, which ancient Semites would mistakenly interpret as an adequate expression of God's essence.
For example, ancient Israelites, like sexist posters on this thread, are determined commit idolatry by creating a graven image of God as a male in their minds. God refutes this crude anthropomorphism in Exodus 3:14, Isaiah 55:8-9. and especially Numbers 23:7, which freaks our posters out, and so, needs to be quoted in full with a literal translation:
"God is not male (Hebrew: ish), with the result that He lies, nor a mortal (Hebrew: adam = human) with the result that he changes His mind."
God first denies that God is male because of the Israelite patriarchal bias and then extends this to a denial that God is human.
(3) God will be whatever God will be to Israelites, but God reserves the right to be whatever God will be to peoples of different cultures and religions:
"Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the Lord. Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor and the
Arameans from Kir (Amos (9:7)?"
In Amos, God is judging people for neglecting social justice and for taking their status as God's chosen people for granted. To sober them up, God lifts the veil on the general revelation that supplements God's special revelation to Israel: God revealed
Godself to pagans and guided them to their divinely appointed lands just as surely as God did so for Israel! Similarly, the Greeks worshiped the very real "unknown God," and, as a result, God overlooked their prior ignorance (Acts 17:30) and pagans can be saved apart from formal profession of faith in Christ (Romans 2:7)! With our fuller revelation in Christ, we must still globally spread His teaching (Matthew 28:16-20).
We must now more fully assess the actual purpose of the abundant feminine God imagery in Scripture.