We rely on the support of readers like you. Please consider supporting TheTorah. By using this site you agree to our Terms of Use. Compared to the birth of a son, Leviticus 12 requires a double-period of purification upon the birth of a daughter. Interpreters in antiquity offered two basic models to explain this. The length of the process, however, is dependent upon the gender of the child.
If the child is male, the period of impurity is one week, like that of a menstruant v. Ancient and medieval Jewish interpreters struggled to explain the different time periods for each sex. In traditional Jewish circles, the best-known explanation appears in the Talmud, in which R. Shimon bar Yochai explains that a parturient woman must bring a sin offering because she swears never to sleep with her husband again due to the pain of childbirth.
Niddah 31a :. Notably, even as R. The explanation here may be meant tongue-in-cheek. One approach to understanding the details of the distinction between post-partum laws for male and female babies was to look for rational or biological reasons.
The earliest example of this approach can be found in Philo ca. Explaining what it means that God created woman out of the side [5] of man, he writes Questions and Answers on Genesis :. Philo seems to be harmonizing an apparent to him contradiction: woman is only part of man, and inferior, but takes twice as long to create. His answer appears to be that since the parts of the man are sounder or more solidly constructed, they are easier to put together.
Leviticus 12, though not mentioned explicitly by Philo, serves as the background for his explanation. Instead, as noted by Iain Lonie , an expert on classical medicine from Otago University, this belief about embryonic development was a general tenet of Greek medicine, widely accepted among Greek natural philosophers:. Similarly, Shlomo Naeh, Professor of Rabbinics at Hebrew University, notes that the connection between the post-partum flow and the amount of time it takes for a fetus to form goes back to Hippocrates 5 th cent.
