Birth, the Body, and Purity

"If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days." The boy is circumcised on the eighth day, and the mother continues "in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary." For a daughter, the times are doubled: two weeks and sixty-six days.

Then she brings a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a purification offering. "And if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons."

Leviticus 15 deals with discharges: a man's chronic discharge, a seminal emission, a woman's monthly period, and a woman's prolonged bleeding. Each makes a person unclean for a time; washing, waiting, and in the abnormal cases an offering, restore them. Anything they lie or sit on becomes unclean too.

The purpose: "Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is among them."

Three different things

Some categories overlap: tzara'at is both a physical condition and a ritual impurity. But Leviticus never says a mother sinned by giving birth. Her "sin offering" is, as many scholars translate it, a purification offering.

Why the different periods for a son and a daughter?

The text does not say. Suggestions include: the boy's circumcision on the eighth day ends the first stage early; a girl is a future mother, so the purification is doubled; or the difference reflects ancient beliefs about birth. Some modern readers see it as reflecting a lower status for women; others note that the offering is identical for both. We report the views without pretending to know the reason.

Mikveh: ritual baths

Washing in water restored purity. By the 1st century BC, Jews built stepped ritual baths (mikva'ot) cut into rock, and hundreds have been found in Jerusalem, near the Temple Mount, at Qumran, Masada, Sepphoris and in Galilean villages. They are some of the clearest archaeological evidence of purity laws being kept, from the Hasmonean period onward.