We are studying the material from the health class that Moses and Aaron had to teach the people of Israel during the days they lived in the wilderness. For the past two days we've been studying health regulations the men were to follow. Today's and tomorrow's studies involve health regulations for women.
Just as the hygiene information provided for men regarded bodily discharges, both the normal and abnormal kind, so also the information provided for women involves normal and abnormal discharges. We need to keep in mind that these people were living in a time when it wasn't as easy as it is today for people to keep from spreading bodily fluids. We're adults and we know how human bodies work so I'll use plain (but not crude!) words here. Women couldn't run down to the CVS and grab a box of sanitary napkins. Men couldn't purchase a box of prophylactics. Neither men nor women could obtain a prescription for antibiotics or antifungal creams to clear up the various types of infections that can be transmitted through discharges from the male or female organs. The people of Moses' day were living very closely together in a communal setting and they lacked the helpful health products that are so easily available to you and me. The chance of a person's bodily fluids transferring to other persons or to surfaces they sat on was quite high and that's why the instructions of Chapter 15 were given.
The first health advice we'll look at today involves a normal process of women's bodies during their childbearing years. "When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches her bed will be unclean; they must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Anyone who touches anything she sits on will be unclean; they must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when anyone touches it, they will be unclean till evening." (Leviticus 15:19-23)
These are the same instructions as were given to men with a discharge. They couldn't sleep in the same bed as their spouse or sit on a chair anyone else might sit on during this time. A woman's monthly period may last less than seven days but the time of her ceremonial uncleanness was for seven days. If the woman had small children at home, then it seems certain she would have had to touch them at various times all throughout each day of this week, so I'm not sure how the children's ceremonial uncleanness was handled unless they, along with their mother, stayed home that week. Or perhaps members of the extended family cared for the small children during that time. I couldn't find anything online that explained how this worked.
If the woman is harboring any type of viral or bacterial illness, there is some risk of transmission to others if she has no effective means of keeping herself cleaned up from flowing blood. The risk of transmitting an illness through menstrual blood is nowhere near as large as transmitting an illness by blood from a vein or blood that's flowing from a person's nose or flowing from an open wound. But according to the medical information I found online, the woman herself is more vulnerable to contracting an illness during this time if she has marital relations with her husband. During this time it's far easier for bacteria to travel into the female organs or into the bladder, perhaps causing a urinary tract infection in an era when no antibiotics existed to treat it. Another bacterial infection, known as pelvic inflammatory disease, can occur if enough bacteria are able to enter and proliferate in the female organs. This is also an illness that must be treated with antibiotics. The potential for pelvic inflammatory disease to turn deadly exists, especially in a person with a weakened immune system, but the greater risk is that it will cause scarring of the fallopian tubes which in turn causes infertility. For such reasons, the people were given this health advice: "If a man has sexual relations with her and her monthly flow touches him, he will be unclean for seven days; any bed he lies on will be unclean." (Leviticus 15:24) Verse 24 is intended to discourage the husband and wife from interacting sexually this one week of the month.
Abstaining from marital relations during this week helped to protect the woman from infections, as we've already discussed, but it also protected the man and anyone else he might come in close contact with. People didn't have indoor plumbing then and couldn't jump in the shower and lather up with antibacterial Dial soap. It's believed soap was originally invented around 2800 BC, or at least that's the time period when some of the earliest archaeological evidence exists for the manufacture of soap. and the Israelites made their exodus from Egypt probably somewhere in the mid-1400s BC. So we see our text today was provided almost 2000 years before the invention of soap. Leviticus has frequently mentioned washing with water but it has made no mention of soap. This is likely because they didn't yet have soap. If you don't have soap you can remove a lot of germs by rubbing your hands briskly together under flowing water from a faucet, but the ancient Israelites didn't have faucets. They could rub their hands together for several minutes in a basin of freshly gathered water and could remove a lot of germs that way, but not quite as effectively because the germs washed off into the basin of water that their hands were in. They had no shower spray to stand under so they could effectively bathe their whole body and wash bacteria down the drain. If a man in those times had relations with his wife during the one week of the month when she had flowing blood, he might not be able to remove all traces of the blood. He could wash well enough to not see any traces of blood, but bacterial or viral material could still be present. By instructing him he would be unclean for seven days if he had marital relations with his wife, he was being encouraged to avoid marital relations during that time and this would reduce the risk of infection to him, to his wife, and to others in the household or the community.
Today we've looked at the health regulations regarding a normal flow of blood. Tomorrow we'll talk about what happens when a woman experiences a flow of blood for other reasons and we'll talk about how the Lord Jesus healed a woman who had dealt with a health problem and with being ceremonially unclean for twelve years.
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