Woman, Womb, and Wellspring

February 24, 2015

by Mark Garcia

Love Your Mother

We continue a series of reflections on the plight of women in the church and home, and the biblical teaching regarding men, women, and what it means to be safe. These reflections are truncated and snapshot versions of material for a book which is being organized under the title, Are Women Safe in the Church? In my view, to answer this question we must ask first what a woman is, then ask why she would be unsafe, then why she could be unsafe in the Church of all places, and then finally why, in the end, the Church as Christ has redeemed her and as his Spirit inhabits her is in fact – or, in every place it is applicable, must become – the safest place for a woman to be. Of course, though it is difficult and painful to admit, it will also, invariably, expose ways the Church has failed to be this. But let us take heart: even for Churches like these, and for fathers and husbands and sons and brothers and uncles and cousins and employers and neighbors like these, there is a way forward. Truly, there is. It doesn’t have to be like this.

Now, I know that endeavoring, even in this very roundabout way, to return us all to the flawed and restless Church, may sound to some a bit too close to betrayal. After all, I have said we have a problem, and that problem is far too often the Church. Granted, and I wrestle with this far more than I let on. But I cannot refuse the Church while I plead for her health: after all, in divine grace, the solution is in her, too. Yes, in her. As I point to what the Church must become in order to be, in deed and not just in word, the safest place for a woman, I will ask us to love our Mother:

“But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Gal. 4:26).

Woman and Levitical Life

The following reflections presuppose the material reviewed in previous posts, and so we pick up midstream, bringing some of our disparate remarks on the Levitical woman together for a – hopefully – more fruitful, or least less scattered, end. Again I note my indebtedness to the fine work of the scholars noted in our previous study, and particularly Richard Whitekettle, whose work I continue to summarize and interact with in this section on Leviticus, though largely invisibly.

As we have learned, in Leviticus 12:2-4 and 15:19-24, prior to the onset of the menstrual or puerperal discharge, a woman was pure. Following the onset, she was impure. After 7 or 40 days, she was pure again. This pure/impure distinction, then, involves not constant categories but sequential ones. This sets the woman apart from the purity/impurity of the animals: a fish was always pure, a crab was always impure, but a woman was sometimes pure, sometimes impure. And when a woman was pure, she was not a threat to sancta; when she was impure, she was a threat to sancta.

Sancta, to speak briefly, included any object which had been symbolically or physically set apart/devoted/transferred to the divine realm. In the Levitical schema, the divine realm was located at the center of Israel’s wilderness encampment, in the tent-dwelling of Yahweh, who created life and gave order to the cosmos. Contraposed to this spatial center is the periphery located in the wilderness beyond the encampment, a place of disorder and desolation. The parallel works as follows:

Center of the camp = divine realm = life

Periphery of the camp = divine absence; wilderness = disorder and desolation

As Wenham explains, the physical condition needed to approach the divine realm is epitomized by the phrase “fullness of life.” This “fullness of life” is a quality commensurate with the vivific character of the divine realm. God is, particularly in terms of the Leviticus-Genesis interplay, the God of creation, of holiness, of glory, of full life. Purity, then, and the notion of being unblemished, is a matter of fullness of life in the sense of being devoted or dedicated to life. Disqualification from the area of sancta comes with any lack of the fullness of life. A disqualifying thing was thus often relegated to the wilderness, the area of non-life and of desolation (Lev. 4:11-12; 10:4-5; 13:46; 21:1-4)…

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Woman, Childbirth, Impurity, and Leviticus

February 20, 2015

by Mark Garcia