Do Baby Girls Have More Cooties?

I was luxuriating in the afterglow of the birth of my daughter.  My hospital roommate was a Hasidic mother of seven.  In what I am sure was a breach of good manners, I leaned over and said to her, “You know, I’ve always wondered why the Torah says a mother is ritually unclean for one week when she bears a son, but for two weeks when she bears a daughter” (Leviticus 12).

My roommate replied, “That is because a girl can become a mother.”   Interesting but not entirely satisfying answer.  Does childbirth and even the potential for childbirth render one ritually unclean?

Physical purity laws of Leviticus are confusing for modern people. I like Christopher J H Wright’s explanation that these laws that govern our very private spaces are best described as symbolic rather than ceremonial. They teach that, since the Fall of Adam and Eve, sin is as much a part of us as our blood and tears and spit and semen.  Leviticus is very realistic about how human beings are, as Pope John Paul says, ensouled bodies.  The body is complicit in the sins of the mind.  We are a package deal. These purity laws symbolize how closely sin clings to us. This is so even when we’re doing the most important and necessary things like eating and drinking and digesting and going to war and giving birth.  Your sin wrapped up in those things, as close to you as your blood.

As I get older, I understand that my sinful patterns of fear, pride, and selfishness so govern the way I act that it’s hard to see them and it’s hard to get away from them. That is why there are so many laws in Leviticus about atoning for inadvertent sin.  Without the Holy Spirit working in us in a deep way we will not change.  Leviticus should create humility in us.

But still there is the ritual uncleanness of two weeks for having girl babies, one week for boys.  According to Leviticus, are girls and their mothers somehow worse?  Do girl babies have more cooties than boy babies?  I learned the answer from that famous feminist, John Calvin, as this site has spoken of before. Humanity is unclean, and the boys’ uncleanness is symbolically cut off on the eighth day, when they are circumcised.  In this way, the boy babies point to the coming of Christ, who was cut off for our sins. So, girls are not more unclean than boys.  Girls have an unclean time of the month, but boys have an unclean body part that must be cut off.  Which is worse?

Nevertheless, there is something unfinished feeling about the laws for purification after childbirth.  If circumcision cut off the impurity of the representative boys, why did it not purify the girl babies and their mothers too?  Why did circumcision have to keep happening? Why were the repetitive sin offerings and burnt offerings were never really enough?  In the fullness of time, Jesus Christ offered that ultimate cleansing.  He was able to touch the woman with the issue of blood and take away all her impurity and fully heal her. And He made the male leper new. He even conquered the impurity of death itself.

Jesus Christ really did fulfill the purity laws and take away the ritual uncleanness so that we can approach God even though we don’t deserve to.   According to Leviticus, both male and female babies bring uncleanness to their mothers. But boy babies, as representatives of the coming Messiah, are cut so that their mother’s impurity is cut off.   However, the greater cleansing of Christ takes away all uncleanness of men and women. He delivers us from the sin that clings so closely.