How the uterus lining builds up and breaks down during the menstrual cycle.
Today we start to learn the very last tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, called Niddah. It addresses the laws of a woman who is menstruating: how she becomes ritually impure, what she ritually contaminates, how she is forbidden to have sexual relations with her husband, and how she may leave her status and become ritually pure. To this day many of these laws are carefully followed by religious Jewish couples who observe periods of sexual abstinence during and following the menstrual period.
It’s Not Just Judaism
It is not just the Jewish tradition that identifies menstruation with ritual impurity (and physical danger). Mary Douglas in her now classic work Purity and Danger noted that this connection was found among many disparate cultures. For example (and there are many) the Mae Enga from the Central Highland of New Guinea also have strong beliefs about sexual pollution. “They believe that contact with it or with a menstruating women will, in the absence of appropriate counter-magic, sicken a man and cause persistent vomiting, “kill” his blood so that it turns black, corrupt his vital juices so that his skin darkens and hangs in folds as his flesh wastes, permanently dull his wits, and eventually lead to a slow decline and death.” And then there are the Lele, a group that lives in the Kinshasa region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here is Douglas (P&D 152):
… a menstruating [Lele] woman could not cook for her husband or poke the fire, lest he fall ill. She could prepare the food, but when it came to approaching the fire she had to call a friend in to help. These dangers were only risked by men, not by other women or children. Finally, a menstruating woman was a danger to the whole community if she entered the forest. Not only was her menstruation certain to wreck any enterprise in the forest that she might undertake, but it was thought to produce unfavourable conditions for men.
According to the South Sudan News Agency, (which claims to be “South Sudan’s Leading Independent News Source”) the Nuer (the second largest tribe in South Sudan) also have their own version of the laws of Niddah:
Many aspects of the Nuer culture are sometimes similar to the cultural aspects of the Bible’s Old Testament people which include feature of their social structure, the kinship reckoning and the extended family aspects of marriage, divorce, rite of passage and even religious concepts of God, spirits, sin and sacrifice. In the spiritual beliefs of Nuer culture, “women who are having their menstrual period cannot drink milk, visit the cattle area or eat food that had been cooked in kettle used for boiling milk because doing so would be harmful to the cattle.”
The Koran (not the Koren) also records a warning against intimacy with a menstruating woman:
And they ask you about menstruation; Say It is harm, so keep away from women during menstruation; And do not approach them until they become pure And when they have purified themselves, then come to them from where Allah has ordained for you; Indeed, Allah loves those who are constantly repentant and loves those who purify themselves. (Al-Quran 2:222-223)
And what about Hindus? In 2011, two Indian researchers published an analysis of the social and cultural practices regarding menstruation. They studied a group of Indian adolescent girls and their mothers from various communities and classes in Ranchi in eastern India, and found that both Hindu (and Moslem) women practiced varying menstrual taboos:
Hindu girls reported restricting themselves from religious practices during menstruation whereas Muslim (follower of Islam) girls reported that they do not touch religious books or read ‘‘Namaz’’ or even do not go to the ‘‘Mazaar (shrine).’’ Even the Sarna tribe girls do not go to the ‘‘Sarnasthal (Worship place of Sarna people)’’ during menstruation however, Christian girls reported that they worship and attend church during menses and can even touch and read the holy Bible.
If you want to get a sense of prevailing attitudes about menstruation at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, try this, written by Pliny the Elder written around 79 CE in his famous work Natural History (7:15):
But it would be difficult to find anything more bizarre than a woman's menstrual flow. Proximity to it turns new wine sour; crops tainted with it are barren, grafts die, garden seedlings shrivel, fruit falls from the tree on which it is growing, mirrors are clouded by its very reflection, knife blades are blunted, the gleam of ivory dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are instantly corroded by rust and a dreadful smell contaminates the air.
Ritual impurity as disorder
One of Mary Douglas’ many contributions to the ethnographic study of purity is her analysis of the concept of “dirt”:
If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements…. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing…(P&D 36-37)
Perhaps then, rabbinic hierarchies of ritual purity and impurity were an attempt to identify "matter out of place.” Douglas wrote that “if uncleanness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order.” Which is precisely what the complicated laws found in this tractate attempt to do.
“...the binary, pure/impure structure at the base of nidah also imposed order on the chaos.”
Shai Secunda and the Iranian Talmud
Shai Secunda is Associate Professor of Judaism at Bard College and the Persian language consultant for Koren’s Steinsaltz Talmud. He is a scholar of the historic Iran in which the Babylonian Talmud was produced, and he has written a new and invaluable book when it comes to the history of the Jewish laws of Niddah: The Talmud's Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Contex. Alas you will need to wait until 2020 for Oxford University Press to publish it. What makes his book really interesting is that it he reads talmudic passages alongside texts composed by the neighboring religious communities in the Sasanian Empire, which was comprised of “an impressively diverse spectrum of religious communities including, among others, Christians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Jews, and Zoroastrians.” The empire lasted from 224-651 CE and was the last Persian kingdom before the rise of Islam. It was inside of this empire that the Babylonian Talmud was composed. He noted for example, that in Zoroastrian tradition there was a myth about the dangerous powers of the gaze of menstruating women. (You can find more examples in his 2014 paper The Fractious Eye: On the Evil Eye of Menstruants in Zoroastrian Tradition.)
And she should not look at the sun nor at the other luminaries. And she should not look at cattle and plants. And she should not engage in conversation with a righteous man, for a demon of such violence is the demon of menstruation that, [where] the other demons do not strike things with the evil eye, this one strikes [them] with the evil eye.
The Zoroastrian Parallels of Niddah
Secunda notes some important parallels between this Zoroastrian tradition and some of the laws of Niddah that were formulated in the Babylonian Talmud. Take for example the Middle Persian compilation known as Sayist ne Sayist. Here is an excerpt, translated by Secunda:
A menstruant woman who becomes clean within a three-night period, should not wash until the fifth day. And from the fifth day to the ninth day, whenever she becomes clean, she is to keep sitting in cleanness for one day for the waiting period. Afterwards, she should wash in the usual way. And after the nine-day waiting period, the waiting period is not an issue...
[Regarding] the menstruant woman, if she has sat in [a state of] menstruation for one month and she [still] is not clean on the thirtieth day, even if she at that time did become clean, and afterwards again became a menstruant, then the [requirement of] the waiting period goes back to the beginning, and it is not authorized for her to wash until the fifth day.
“As the text makes clear,” he writes, “according to Zoroastrian law a woman cannot simply purify herself as soon as her menstrual flow ceases, rather she must wait additional time before purification is allowed. The technical Middle Persian term for the additional day is tayag – “(waiting) period,” while the practice of observing it is known as “sitting in cleanness.” This stringency reminds us of another (Niddah 66a), this one enacted by the Jews in Babylon (and still practiced today):
R. Zeira said: The daughters of Israel were stringent on themselves that even if they see a drop of [vaginal] blood like [the size of] a mustard-seed, they sit [and wait] seven clean [days] on account of it.
Secunda notes that “as it is introduced here, the origin of the described custom is not located in Biblical law, nor is it a legacy of rabbinic legislation, rather, it is attributed to Jewish women who are said to have taken up the stringency on their own.” Thus there is
evidence that two religious communities living alongside Babylonian Jewry deliberately extended ritual impurity even beyond the actual menstrual period. Mandaean authorities strenuously maintained that a couple must wait for a final, post-menstrual baptism before reuniting sexually. Sasanian Zoroastrian priests put considerable effort into establishing, delineating, and debating a one-day ritual waiting period, which was exegetically linked to a section of their scriptures. In short, all three religious communities tried, in their own way, to extend ritual impurity beyond the menstrual flow.
Then Secunda suggests this, which he acknowledges is “entirely within the realm of speculation.”
How might we envisage the role that the Sasanian religious context may potentially have played in the invention of the Jewish “clean day” stringency? In light of our above focus on the attribution of the stringency to the “Daughters of Israel,” perhaps it was specifically Jewish women who acted as a conduit for outside religious influence. It could be argued that female piety draws more easily on neighboring female practices – even ones initiated by male religious authorities, like Zoroastrian priests. Unlike rigorously policed rabbinic discourse, Jewish women could have conceivably “traded notes” with their gentile neighbors with far greater ease than their male compatriots, allowing for a more seamless adoption of new customs and approaches…
In some of his early work on the relationship between Babylonian Jewry and Sasanian Zoroastrianism, Yaakov Elman posited a kind of one- upmanship – in his formulation, a “holier than thou syndrome” – between Jewish and Zoroastrian women. One dynamic of this competition would be that Jewish women could argue that their approach of waiting a full seven days following their period was more stringent, purer, and thus more efficacious, than both the Mandaean and Zoroastrian systems.
There is a great deal more of interest in Secunda’s book, which finishes with these wise words:
Not only do observant Jews still practice the strictures of nidah, difference and differentiation remain an important part of the calculus. To this day, one of the measures by which religious Jews identify themselves as religious is based on the observance of “family purity” – as the laws of nidah are commonly known….
Whether we like it or not, difference continues to form the bedrock of meaning and with it, human culture and society. …systems of purity and impurity, with their differences and distinctions, are here to stay. We might as well try to make sense of them.
