Meaning of grammatical gender in Hebrew for inanimate objects

For English (and many other languages) grammatical gender in Hebrew constitute a serious problem: how come that in Hebrew a book (ספר - ספרים) is masculine and a lamp (מנורה - מנורות) is feminine?

Do the interpreters of the Torah explain what was the divine thought behind the fact that the Biblical Hebrew assigns genders to inanimate objects?

For example, the Gemmorah in Kiddushin (2-3) discusses different nouns that appear to be both masculine and feminine in the Torah (דרך, שמש, מחנה), but it does not say why do they have genders, to begin with.