Childbirth and skin diseases—yes, those are the topics at hand in this parsha. Many people would definitely prefer to skip over these and move on to something about love and hope. Or at least something with a bit more action! After the dramatic events in the book of Exodus, is Leviticus turning out to be the sequel that should never have been made?

But maybe we can “salvage” something here. Let’s zoom in on 12:2–8, which concerns childbirth. Here, God instructs Moses on what to tell the Israelites:

The cultural landscape of ancient Israel was not like that of modern Jews. Orthodox Judaism will recognize its practices in some of these verses, though not all. For Reform Jews, this parsha can be a conundrum wrapped up in an enigma, and best served with a pastrami on rye.

So first things first. “Unclean” does not mean dirty, as though there is something terrible about giving birth to a child. It is not an ethical judgment. In the world of our forefathers and foremothers, any number of things could make someone ritually unclean, requiring an assortment of ceremonies to restore the state of being clean. This was a world full of symbolism. For example, some commentators take the view that childbirth rendered the mother unclean because it represented a loss of blood, which symbolically was a loss of life. “While childbirth, menstruation and sexual intercourse would surely have been considered normal, they still caused uncleanness because each involved the loss of life-liquids, barring people from worship until they recovered from such loss.”1 This was a symbolic world that focused on life and death, and how those were expressed in social life.

But next—why is the mother unclean for having given birth to a daughter, twice as long as for a son? Is there something about a girl that even symbolically leads to more loss of life than a boy? Is this an example of toxic patriarchy? But one author—a woman—says this:

After having given birth to a baby boy, a woman must wait a minimum of seven days before beginning her pure days; while after a baby girl is born, she must wait a minimum of fourteen days. Since the female child inherently carries a higher degree of holiness, due to her own biological, life creating capability, a greater void, or tumah, remains after her birth. Thus, the greater tumah after a baby girl’s birth reflects her greater capacity for holiness (due to her creative powers) and necessitates the longer wait to remove this ritual impurity.2

While not everyone might agree with the specifics of her interpretation, this writer may be on to something: perhaps there is something positive about the longer time required when giving birth to a daughter.

What is called the mother’s “purifying” runs to 33 or 66 days total, beyond the initial seven- or fourteen-day period. After that, the way to exit the state of uncleanness is by bringing sacrifices of lambs and/or fowl. This is described as “making atonement” for the mother, even though we are talking about ritual and not ethical matters. Again, we are in another world here. Jews today do not, of course, bring sacrifices. For one thing, there is no longer a Temple in Jerusalem, which is where such sacrifices had to take place (and before the Temple was built, the Tabernacle). For another thing, many Jews today find the idea of animal sacrifices to be outmoded, or superstitious, or just off-putting. Welcome to the world of ancient Israel. The sacrifices had many purposes, but one of them certainly was for the animal’s loss of life to compensate for the ritual uncleanness, which symbolized a loss of the person’s life.

As late as the first century AD, we find that Jews are still living in this symbolically charged world. It was into that world that Jesus was born:

And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Yeshua,3 the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they [his parents] brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”) and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”4

Something unusual happened on that occasion:

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.

And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Yeshua, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said,

“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.”5

This was not your typical purification visit to the Temple. Whoever Simeon was, in this passage (from Luke’s gospel), we learn that he recognized Jesus as the Messiah who would bring salvation to all peoples—light for Gentiles and glory to Israel.

Jesus’ mother was purifying herself, symbolically restoring life to herself—life that had been lost through childbirth. Years later, Jesus would say to one of his followers, Peter: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”6

One might say that the symbols of Leviticus became reality in Yeshua.

Endnotes

1. L. Michael Morales. Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus (Downers Grove, IL: Apollos / InterVarsity Press), p. 157.

2. Chana Weisberg, “Why the difference in the laws of ritual purity between the birth of males and females?” https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/510244/jewish/Ritual-purity-after-birth-of-males-and-females.htm

3. The Hebrew name he would have been known by.

4. Luke 2:21–24.

5. Luke 2:25–32. Compare Isaiah 49:6.

6. John 14:6 (emphasis added).