neqevah

The lexica are unanimous that נְקֵבָה denotes the female of humans or animals, standing in fixed antonymy with זָכָר "male" (BDB 666; HALOT 2:719; DCH 5:756). It is regularly derived from the root נקב "to perforate, bore," understood as an anatomical designation of the female, though BDB and others register the derivation with some caution and it is not semantically operative in usage. The Septuagint renders it consistently with θῆλυς. The distribution is overwhelmingly in the Priestly and legal material (Genesis 1:27; 5:2; the flood pairs of Genesis 6-7; the sacrificial regulations of Leviticus 3-5 permitting female victims for certain offerings; the parturition laws of Leviticus 12; the vow-valuation scale of Leviticus 27, where the female is assessed at roughly sixty percent of the male). The one genuinely disputed occurrence is Jeremiah 31:22, נְקֵבָה תְּסוֹבֵב גָּבֶר, "a female shall encompass a man," widely regarded as among the most obscure clauses in the book; proposals range from a woman protecting or courting a man (a reversal of the normal order), to a description of restored Israel, to text-critical emendation, with Holladay, McKane, and Lundbom surveying the options without consensus. The debate, however, concerns the sense of the whole clause, not the lexeme, which means "female" throughout.