Texts in Conversation
Leviticus requires woman to avoid contact after childbirth, connected to menstrual impurity. The Letter of Jeremiah mocks idols whose offerings are touched by such women, using purity requirements as satire to say that foreign gods have no real power.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Leviticus 12:2
Hebrew Bible
1 The Lord spoke to Moses: 2 “Tell the Israelites, ‘When a woman produces offspring and bears a male child, she will be unclean seven days, as she is unclean during the days of her menstruation. 3 On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin must be circumcised. 4 Then she will remain thirty-three days in blood purity. She must not touch anything holy, and she must not enter the sanctuary until the days of her purification are fulfilled.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Letter of Jeremiah 1:29
Deuterocanon
27 for if they fall to the ground at any time, they can’t rise up again by themselves. If they are bowed down, they can’t make themselves straight; but the offerings are set before them, as if they were dead men. 28 And the things that are sacrificed to them, their priests sell and spend. In like manner, their wives also lay up part of it in salt; but to the poor and to the powerless they give none of it. 29 The menstruating woman and the woman in childbirth touch their sacrifices, knowing therefore by these things that they are no gods. Don’t fear them. 30 For how can they be called gods? Because women set food before the gods of silver, gold, and wood. 31 And in their temples the priests sit on seats, having their clothes torn and their heads and beards shaven, and nothing on their heads.
Date: 300–101 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... References to sexuality in this would-be letter of Jeremiah appear in association with its attack on idolatry (inspired by Jeremiah 10:1–16). Idols’ priests are corrupt thieves, who also benefit “the prostitutes on the terrace” (11), sitting along passages, burning bran incense, with cords around them (42–43). By breaking the cord, men chose a woman who then mocked her fellows as unattractive. Herodotus alleges a similar practice among Babylonian cult prostitutes, but with no reference to bran incense and claiming all women had to undergo this (Histories 1.199). Reference to Bel (42–43) may indicate the Marduk cult (compare Isaiah 46:1; Jeremiah 50:2; 51:44). Purity laws are ignored: Women menstruating or at childbirth may touch sacrifices (29). Cult prostitution, condemned in Deuteronomy 23:17–18, serves for the author to indicate a nexus between idolatry and sexual wrongdoing (compare Wisdom of Solomon 13–15, Romans 1) ..."
William Loader, “Sexuality in the Apocrypha,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Apocrypha, ed. Gerbern S. Oegema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 516–533.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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