Texts in Conversation
Leviticus assigns a longer purification for mothers after the birth of a daughter instead of a son. Jubilees retroactively applies this to the creation of Adam and Eve, suggesting that Eve’s emergence occurred a week after Adam, following Leviticus.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Leviticus 12:5
Hebrew Bible
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. 5 If she bears a female child, she will be impure fourteen days as during her menstrual flow, and she will remain sixty-six days in blood purity.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Jubilees 3:8
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
7 Therefore man and wife shall be one and therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cling to his wife, and they shall be one flesh. 8 In the first week Adam was created, and the rib — his wife: in the second week He showed her to him: and for this reason the commandment was given to keep in their defilement, for a male seven days, and for a female twice seven days. 9 And after Adam had completed forty days in the land where he had been created, we brought him into the garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it, but they brought his wife in on the eightieth day, and after this she entered into the garden of Eden.
Date: 170–125 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Jubilees stresses that Eve’s final emergence took place only at the end of the second week, that is, fully seven days after Adam’s emergence. The reason is that the author had thought of a clever way of supporting his own particular scenario for Eve’s creation. He cited a certain law in Leviticus 12:1-5 concerning a woman who gives birth. That law is somewhat puzzling, since it states that if a woman gives birth to a son, “she shall be impure for seven days,” but if she gives birth to daughter, her period of impurity is fourteen days. Why this difference? Jubilees’ answer is that this difference reflects the fact that Adam was created at the end of the first week, whereas Eve was not created (fully) until the end of the second week—hence, one week of impurity for a boy, two weeks for a girl ..."
James L. Kugel, A Walk through Jubilees: Studies in the Book of Jubilees and the World of Its Creation (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 38.
* 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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