April 22, 2023

 

The Anesthetized Rib

This week’s double reading (Tazria’-Metzora‘) opens with an unusual law: “When a woman conceives and gives birth to a male child, she will be ritually impure for seven days; just as with the period of her menstruation, so will she be ritually impure. On the eighth day, the flesh of his foreskin will be circumcised… But if she gives birth to a female child, she will be ritually impure for two weeks, as in [the ritual impurity of] her menstruation” (Lev 12:1-5).

 

Interpreters have been puzzled by this distinction—one week of ritual impurity if the mother has a son, two weeks if she has a daughter. Does a daughter’s birth require twice as much purification time for the mother as a son’s because a daughter by nature imparts more impurity? Or is the fact that the newborn son is circumcised on the eighth day somehow decisive, ending the mother’s ritual impurity a week before a daughter’s birth? Or is this, as some feminist interpreters have suggested, just another case of gender discrimination?

 

An interesting explanation comes from an under-appreciated source—the book of Jubilees, a book written by an unknown Jewish author toward the end of the biblical period (probably sometime around the year 200 BCE). The author says it all has to do with the creation of Adam and Eve.

 

The Torah seems to give two different accounts of the creation. In chapter 1 of Genesis, it says that “God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27). But chapter 2 goes on to relate that God first created Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden. Only later, when a female equivalent (‘ezer kenegdo) could not be found, did God anesthetize Adam and take the “rib” or “side” of Adam’s sleeping body and shape it into a woman. So what really happened—were Adam and Eve created simultaneously, or was Adam created first and Eve shaped out of part of Adam’s body?

 

The book of Jubilees says that the Torah is reporting on a two-step creation. In the first step, God did indeed create all of humanity, “male and female He created them,” but the female part was left inside the male, a little pouch somewhere in the male’s “side.” All this took place on the sixth day of the world’s first week (Gen 1:31). Then came the seventh day, the first Sabbath. In the week that followed, the second step occurred. God said, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2:18), so He anesthetized Adam with a “deep sleep” (Gen 2:21), pulled the pouch out of Adam’s side, and turned the female homunculus (homuncula?) into a full-sized human being: Eve.

 

All this happened, Jubilees is careful to assert, on the sixth day of the second week. If so, then the law of ritual impurity after childbirth precisely mirrors these events: Adam was created on the sixth day of the first week, and in commemoration of this fact, a mother who gives birth to a male child is ritually impure for a single week. Eve, by contrast, was not fully created until the sixth day of the second week, so in commemoration of that fact, a mother who gives birth to a female child is ritually impure for two weeks.

 

Besha‘ah Tovah, and Shabbat shalom!