Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over. – Leviticus 12:4

Today's Scripture Reading (November 9, 2021): Leviticus 12

Author Nancy E. Turner argues that "the best thing a girl can be is a good wife and mother. It is a girl's highest calling. I hope I am ready." The words seem almost archaic to our contemporary minds. But I am convinced that she is right. Maybe her words would sound better if we added a second truth; "The best thing a boy can be is a good husband and father. It is a boy's highest calling." Because if it is valid for one gender, it should be true for the other. I believe that it is. The best thing that I can be is a good father.

But the reality is that our society seems to raise different expectations for men, and so, often, men fail at what should be their highest calling; being a father. We, and I know that I stand among you, place other things in that place of priority, often until it is too late and we have given away to other people what should have been our priority. For that, we need to repent, and our behavior needs to change.

Leviticus stresses that the woman would suffer through a period of ritual uncleanliness following the birth of a child. The current passage concerns a male child, and the ritual uncleanness would last forty days. For seven days, she is ceremonially unclean (Leviticus 12:2). Then, on the eighth day, mother and father are to bring the child into the sanctuary to be circumcised. But the woman still hasn't been purified; that would take an additional thirty-three days. For a female child, those required times of isolation are doubled.

But the question remains, what does this say about the woman and the act of giving birth. Some would argue that the act of giving birth is in itself sinful, that the woman is held responsible for bringing another sinner into the world. But that is not true. At the heart of the issue is the idea of original sin. The purification ritual after birth did not cast a negative shadow on either the woman or the child. It was a recognition of the sin of the race, a picture drawn with a ritual that takes place after the birth of a child. British evangelist and preacher G. Campbell Morgan phrases it this way.

Motherhood is one of the most sacred and beautiful things in the whole realm of human experience. This needs no argument. But motherhood is exercised in a race which is defiled. When the great singer of Israel, in his penitential psalm, said: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5), he was casting no reflection upon his own mother, but rather stating a racial fact, from which no human being escapes." (Morgan)

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Leviticus 13