Lecture

Jesus heals two daughters in a single story woven together in the Gospels. We hear first from the father of a young girl and then this story is interrupted by another, a woman who Jesus identifies as “daughter.” Both females are healed, and the stories emphasize the power of Jesus to make whole, and both speak to the reality of ritual purity that was part of Jewish life and remain so today in many Jewish circles.

As we move forward, it's very important for Christians to recognize that impurity does not equal sinfulness. It is not immoral to be impure when we're speaking about menstruation or the ejaculation of semen and the marriage act. Scholars often raise the matter of cleanness or purity as important to these stories. However, Jesus is not made impure by the hemorrhaging woman's touch. Additionally, touching a corpse such as Jairus' daughter, it's a worthy act. It makes a person ritually unclean, but it is not wrong or sinful.

So in neither encounter is Jesus' state of ritual purity at the center. In Galilee, most people would be in a state of ritual impurity or know someone who is. And since they're not in a sacred space like the Jerusalem temple, it's not a matter for alarm and there are rites to fix their impurity.

We begin with a father hurrying to Jesus with terrible news and an urgent request. Jairus, the synagogue leader, has a very sick daughter and he is desperate for Jesus to heal her. The father begs Jesus to come, heal her, and this demonstrates the high regard Jewish families had for their daughters. I want to stress this because there is a myth out there about Jewish daughters not being fully accepted, and this can be based on a faulty interpretation of later rabbinic texts. It's attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who taught around AD 80 to AD 120. He did have a reputation of being quite conservative and maybe old fashioned in his positions. Here's what Rabbi Eliezer says. “Whoever teaches his daughter Torah, it is as though he taught her sexual licentiousness.”

Now, this maxim has been interpreted to forbid any education of the law to daughters and that would seem to contradict the injunctions in Deuteronomy for families to train up their children. Moreover, such a restrictive interpretation takes the rabbinic text out of context. As is done generally throughout the Mishnah, the sages, when they're speaking of the Law, usually only refer to a specific law or sets of law that are under direct discussion.

In this case, the concern was whether one should teach women that meritorious deeds can offset the sin of adultery. This is a discussion in Numbers 5. Now, if women knew this law, would they be more or less inclined to commit adultery? That's the question that was debated. Elsewhere, fathers are enjoined to teach both sons and daughters the Scripture.

Before leaving the rabbinic evidence, mention should also be made of an interchange that happened between Pharisees and Sadducees—a debate centered on the inheritance rules for daughters. The characters in the scene include a father, his daughter, his son, and the son's daughter. Both men die; who inherits? The Sadducees advocate for the two daughters: the father's daughter and his granddaughter, splitting the inheritance. The Pharisees claim that the son's daughter should inherit, along with any of the son's brothers, but the father's daughter does not inherit. Now if this story preserves an historical debate, then we have the Pharisees standing over against the prevailing Roman norms, which were followed in this case by the Sadducees, that allow a daughter to inherit. We don't know which position was more popular in Jesus' day but inscriptional and documentary evidence suggests that the Roman, the Sadducean protocols were normative.

Now, in one important respect, Jewish families stood out from Gentile families. Jewish families did not abandon infants. They didn't seek to abort fetuses. As a Roman historian named Tacitus says, and he says it in a positive way, “Jews raise all their children born to them.” And this is in contrast to discussions about exposing infants. We find this in the wider Gentile world and there are several reasons given for exposing an infant. The baby might be deformed or very weak. In this case, maybe the parent would drown him or her, not in anger, say the sources, but because they were wisely considering how to use family resources and to promote family honor.

Now it is also the case, some parents may have nefarious motives, being greedy to keep money, deciding not to raise more than two children. Other parents might fear raising the child because they saw an evil omen at the child's birth, or perhaps the husband doubted the child's paternity. Some ancient authors indicate that poverty played a role. For example, a poor family might decide not to raise their child because they had no money to educate him properly. Now, poverty is relative of course, and some critics railed against fathers who, while claiming destitution, really were just too stingy to use their money to raise the child.

So while it is true that Gentile families exposed more female babies than male babies, it is also the case that daughters were cherished and their deaths mourned. We see this in the philosopher Plutarch. He wrote a letter to his wife on the death of their two-year-old daughter, Timoxena. He remembers her mildness and her good temper. He remembers her kindness to her nurse, or what we would call nanny, to the other children. Now, Plutarch's main concern in his letter to his wife is that she upholds her stoic constitution and does not grieve or mourn uncontrollably. He counsels that she should remember the delight their daughter brought them in these last two years and that that will counteract the sorrow. For Plutarch and many others, children, including daughters, bring joy, however fleeting their lives might be.

As we return to the story of Jairus' daughter, Jesus' compassion for the girl is evident. He touches her hand, and she rises from her deathbed. The gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus speaks to the girl directly. “Little girl, get up.” This resurrection story shares similarity with the Elijah story, wherein the prophet resuscitates the Shunammite woman's son; you can read about this in 2 Kings 4 and also 8. It also reminds us of the raising of Lazarus. This is in John 11. Both Lazarus and this daughter hear Jesus speak to them while they're in the grave. And Jesus invites her mother and father to feed her, providing more proof that she is indeed alive and not a ghost. She is fully restored to her family.

In this story, it is the father who seeks out Jesus, while the mother remains at home. It would've not have been immodest or inappropriate, however, for the mother to have sought out Jesus. But women were viewed as better at the healing arts and that may be why the mother remained with their daughter.

On the way to healing Jairus' daughter, or, more accurately, raising her from the dead, a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years creates an encounter with Jesus. And from the various gospel details, we put together this picture. She has suffered some sort of vaginal bleeding for over a decade. She has tried all sorts of medical relief to no avail. She's among the crowd that surrounds Jesus and no one, once they hear her story, is alarmed that she is in their midst. Let me repeat. No one is alarmed. I'm going to bust a myth here. We tend to paint this woman as a social outcast, rejected and scorned, even sinful, but that misunderstands the reality of purity and the purity codes at this time.

Purity and sacred space go together and to enter a sacred space like the Jerusalem temple, a man or woman should be ritually pure. Otherwise, ritual impurity is just a fact of life. Corpses need to be prepared for burial and it's a good and right thing to do so. Marital sex is a good thing and right to do. Both make a man unclean. In the case of marital relations, the man is unclean until sundown and he is required to bathe in water. There's not a hint of sinfulness here in the label “impure.”

Leviticus 15 outlines whether and how uncleanliness is transmitted. The man who has an unclean discharge, known in Hebrew as zav, will make unclean any stool he sits upon or bed he uses. And if someone touches that bed, they need to wash their clothes and bathe in water and in the evening, they will be clean. If a man touches anything without having washed his hands, he transmits uncleanness. But if he has first washed his hands, then he can touch anything, and it is not unclean. The context for this injunction could be that the zav needed to rinse his hands after urinating because he may have touched the source of his uncleanness.

Well, let's apply this to the zavah, the woman with the non-menstrual discharge. Leviticus indicates that what she sits on or lies upon is unclean. That is, she can make objects unclean and if someone later sits or lays on them, they need to wash their clothes and bathe and wait until sundown. The woman need not be considered an outcast, for she didn't transmit uncleanness except where she sat. And as the story unfolds in Luke, no one seems worried that she was jostling around in their midst. No one's made unclean by bumping into her. And if she washes her hands, she will not transmit uncleanness. So she doesn't make Jesus unclean by touching His garments.

If she is considered an outcast, I think it is most likely because she's sick and people then and now tend to look down upon the chronically ill as though God has abandoned them or there's something wrong with them that has led to this “punishment.” And there were probably those among her friends that pitied her, had compassion on her, but realized they had no way to heal her. The Gospels emphasized her desperate health issues, and they also reveal a woman who had independent financial means and used her funds for healing remedies, but her money dries up, her condition persists.

Matthew reveals her inner dialogue that shows her faith in Jesus, and she takes action to pursue healing. She touches the fringes or the tassel on Jesus' cloak, and she's healed. Jesus feels power leave Him, and He wants to know who touched Him. But Jesus' question does not bring shame. He doesn't expose her as some people say, quite the opposite. It provides her the opportunity to testify to her healing. And Jesus affirms that. Her faith has healed her. It's a public declaration of her trust in God.

Too often society shames women into silently enduring chronic health issues, but Jesus shows His concern and care, and Jesus identifies her as “daughter,” meaning daughter of God, beloved and seen by Him. Her persistence in pursuing healing is honored, her faith in God despite her suffering, it's lauded. And Jesus is shown to be the one who heals women, who raises daughters from the dead. In our next session, we'll consider the story of the Canaanite woman who confronted Jesus.