Inside-out and Outside-in

This chapter focuses on the development of Jewish practices aimed at preventing couples from being intimate with one another during the menstrual period. It demonstrates how these observances developed specifically within the confines of the Babylonian Talmud, and argues that the nature and strains of this Talmudic discourse reflect some flirtation with Zoroastrian and Mandaean norms, where women were expected to leave the home during the menstrual period. Apparently, the Talmud first considered and assimilated some of these non-rabbinic Sasanian religious views, yet once they came to be seen as heterodox, the Talmud was forced to completely reject menstrual banishments.

The Sasanian Queen-mother and Her Bloodstains

This chapter shows how the Babylonian Jewish practice and Talmudic discourse of menstrual impurity developed within the space of the Sasanian Empire. It considers evidence of imperial persecutions that may have impinged on the observance of the Jewish menstrual rituals. The chapter then considers evidence of Babylonian Jewish awareness of the importance of menstrual impurity in neighboring, non-Jewish religious life, and how the shared similarity may have led to some tension. It surveys a series of Talmudic strategies for competing with the parallel Zoroastrian system. And it shows how the need to emphasize Jewish expertise may have led to the devolvement of the rabbinic diagnostic approach to bloody discharges.

Impure Gates

This chapter shows how menstrual rituals were a meaningful component of religious identity formation in the Sasanian Empire. Attitudes towards menstruation were used to categorize and differentiate religious communities, while changing attitudes towards menstrual impurity signaled changing religious affiliations. Three main Sasanian non-Jewish attitudes towards menstrual impurity are described: The Zoroastrian, which is shown to be formulistic, Syriac Christian, which intentionally violates widespread menstrual taboos, and Mandaean, which placed ritual washing at the center of religious life.

Lifeblood and Deathblood

This chapter demonstrates how the Babylonian Talmud and Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts developed a neo-Galenic notion of menstruation as closely related to a productive, bloody female seed emitted during intercourse. At the same time, these literatures claimed that menstruation originated in primordial evil or sin. Similarly, menstruation was seen as potently dangerous in Babylonian Jewish magical texts. This compound set of beliefs largely reflect a male perspective, in which menstruation was seen as an unusual, and even threatening, physiological phenomenon, and thus highly marked.

Like a Hedge of Lilies

This chapter considers some of the challenges of studying late antique Jewish women and their practices through a text composed and transmitted in male-dominated contexts. It describes how menstruation made meaning through difference and differentiation in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Judaism, and rabbinic Literature. The chapter reviews new approaches to understanding the Babylonian Talmud as situated between classical (Palestinian) rabbinic literature, on the one hand, and its Sasanian context, on the other. It then closely analyzes a story about a rabbi and a heretic recorded at b. Sanhedrin 37a to illustrate the book’s main hermeneutical assumptions and potentialities.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reprises the chief findings of this book, namely, that a key aspect of the Talmudic discourse of menstrual impurity is multidimensional differentiation: between the pure and the impure, women and men, rabbinic and heterodox, gentile and Jew, and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. I suggest that not only is difference important for understanding menstrual impurity in ancient and late ancient Judaism, it is also foundational in modern and contemporary Judaism as well, for example in the way observant Jews self-identify as Orthodox, and in controversies surrounding the rise of female halakhic advisors (yo‘atzot) regarding menstrual impurity.

She Counts for Herself

This chapter looks at three halakhic topics concerning female initiatives and assertions of privacy in the menstrual practices: (1) the regular regiment of menstrual examinations, which is essentially done away with in the Babylonian Talmud; (2) a surprising Talmudic claim that husbands should not second-guess the purity status of their wives; and (3) the well-known and now controversial practice of counting seven days towards purification after the cessation of menstrual flow. The latter practice is attributed by the Talmud to the initiative of Jewish women, initially encouraging a reading of it as a legacy of female enterprise. Notably, the custom of counting seven “clean days” is entirely a Babylonian development, and might be related to similar trends in Zoroastrian and Mandaean practice. Yet, a close examination of the sources demonstrates how fundamentally unstable the texts are, as they occasionally attribute the practice of counting seven “clean days” to rabbinic enactment, rather than female initiative. This leads to close with the admission that the texts do not enable us to peer over the “red fence” of menstrual impurity practices to access Babylonian Jewish culture as it really was.