In chapter 16, 6 of the book of Yechezkel, Yechezkel says "Bedamayich chayi", in or through your blood you shall live. This verse seems rather problematic, and is often translated as "despite your blood", even though this translation is not the best literal interpretation of the prefix"be", which usually means in. This essay will attempt to explore the appropriation of this text about female blood into a rabbinic framework that valued male blood as an exemplar of the Covenant.
The most obvious female blood is the blood of the afterbirth in which the baby is wallowing when God takes mercy on her. This blood is made explicit when Yechezkel says, (16:6) "I saw you wallowing in your blood" .However, perhaps in a more metaphoric way, this scene is referring to menstrual blood and the blood of virginity as well: Both play a part in conception; menstruation is a sign that a woman's body is in a stage where it is able to bear children, while the blood of virginity symbolizes the beginning of sexual activity. These latter readings of female blood gain credence from context: In the story recounted by Yechezkel, the woman in question is found by God as a baby, wallowing in her blood. She is then abandoned until she reaches the start of physical maturity - i.e. menstruation - and grows up to be His wife, thus losing her virginity to Him. It is only when the marriage is consecrated that the baby-woman is fully divested of her blood: (16:8-9): I passed by you, and looked upon you, and behold it was the time of your love; I spread my wings over you and covered your nakedness. I swore to you and came in a covenant with you…and you became mine. I washed you with water; I cleansed your blood from you and covered you with oil.
This washing off of blood is a consecration, symbolized by anointment with oil. This ritual washing is analogous to the washing of menstrual blood in a mikvah, a purifying act that confirms a woman's part in the Covenant, as evidenced by the fact that if she has intercourse sans immersion, she receives karet, a punishment of cutting off that is used when one violates commandments that signify one's partnership in the Covenant of Israel, such as not eating hametz or keeping Yom Kippur. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that here the washing away of blood is part of Israel's entry into a monogamous relationship with God, whereas in later prophets, Israel's violation of that monogamy, a theme discussed later on in this chapter, is often compared to niddah.
The mikvah analogy in "And I washed you with water and rinsed your blood from you and I covered you with oil" can be applied to the bloods of afterbirth and of virginity as well, since both are washed off in the mikvah, leading to re-entry into a state of kedusha, here typified by the act not just of washing with water, but also of covering with oil.
"Badamaich chayi" - We live, literally through the blood of birth, the blood of virginity that starts the process of conception, and the menstrual blood that signifies a woman's ability to conceive. Women often live, literally, in this blood.
The midrash transposes this feminine ideal onto masculine milah ideal of Shemot 12. It explains that the blood spread on the doorposts was that of circumcision. This reading makes sense because circumcision was a prerequisite for eating from the korban pesach, and, like the act of spreading blood on the doorpost, symbolizes one's counting himself in the nation of Israel and using a physical marker to identify himself as such. The pasuk used as evidence for the doorpost blood being circumcision blood is the one from Yechezkel 16 - an ironic choice given that, as previously mentioned, Yechezkel 16 is explicitly dealing with female blood.
The implication of the madras -which has since been circumscribed on Ashkenazik circumcision liturgy - is that the "through your blood" in Yechezkel is that of circumcision: It is through circumcision blood that we, as a nation, continue to live, and continue to carry out the covenant with the God of Abraham. While the issue of covenant certainly does appear in the pesukim, thus lending some credence to this view, I find it problematic to impose an ideal of male sexual blood onto a very viscerally feminine scene, one very much grounded in the anatomical detail of the woman's body. Even according to the pshat of the pesukim, this story is clearly meant to be a metaphor - however, the metaphor is conscious of its own symbolism, and is therefore making a very conscious decision to make itself one of specifically feminine imagery. If the gender were of secondary importance, there would be no need to ground the image so much in the physical details of her body.
Of course, the male blood is easier to read into Shemot: No uncircumcised man may eat of the korban Pesach, so there clearly is a connection between Pesach and milah. If the Exodus is entering into a new stage of the covenant - a stage that was foreseen at the brit ben habetarim and that will eventually entail a new covenant in the form of a set of laws at Mount Sinai, then it makes sense for this sacrifice to be intimately bound to circumcision, which embodies both the old Abrahamic covenant and the new legal-Torah covenant, as well as the continuity between the two. Thus, to eat the Pesach uncircumcised would be to accept the Covenant through one bodily action while denying it with the other. This covenantal duality is echoed in the relationship between the blood on the doorpost from the korban and the eating of the korban: The blood is a public display of covenantal acceptance, while the eating of the korban at home, in the private realm, is a private acceptance of the covenant.
Thus, smearing the blood is a form of bringing the covenant of family into the realm of covenant as community/nation. This foreshadows Israel's development from a set of bet avot - the standard family form mentioned in Shmot chapter 12 - to tribes, in the desert, and to a unified nation, in Israel - which was, after all, the ultimate purpose of the Exodus, embodied in Shmot 6:7-8 "And I will take you to me for a nation…and I will bring you to the land where I stretched My hand, to give it to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to give to you as a heritage, I am God."
Korban Pesach in general, especially when comparing its Shmot and Vayikra versions, seems to be dealing with two conflicting paradigms: The Vayikra version is the male paradigm, which entails a) only circumcised males eating it b) each man and his house taking a sheep, an active acquisition of property very much associated with masculinity, c) temple worship, by its nature an all-male domain. No woman was allowed to be in the area where the sacrifice was slaughtered. The Shmot version is the family paradigm, wherein it is each man "and his house", and the sacrifice must be eaten at a shared familial meal, where children ask questions. Qumran deals with the tension between these two paradigms by simply negating the familial one, having men eat the sacrifice at the temple, though this may be a symptom of Qumran's general attitude towards women and family life.
It is interesting that the midrash chooses to address the male paradigm with a metaphor that, in its most plain meaning, is referring to female blood, because, when it comes to the korban pesach, male and female blood can be seen as almost polar opposites. The male blood of circumcision enables eating from the sacrifice; it is a prerequisite for doing so. Female blood however, prevents one from eating from sacrifices or engaging in temple-related ritual. The male blood of circumcision transfers protection to the door, turning it into part of the Pesach ritual, while female blood transfers impurity to household items, preventing them from being used in kodshim rituals.
Some modern scholars have suggested that the doorpost, as an opening, represents a womb, therefore making the blood on the doorposts the metaphorical birth blood of the Jewish people. This tantalizing interpretation, though it works well with the verses of Yechezkel 16, is not mentioned by the midrash. Furthermore, since birth blood, like menstrual blood, renders a woman unable to partake of sacrifices, it is hard to associate such blood with a sacrificial ritual.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that in transforming the Yechezkel text from one of femininity to masculinity, the midrash transforms the text from one of passivity to one of action, for passivity is associated with the feminine, activity with the masculine. By connecting the two texts in the way that it does, the midrash is reading passivity into activity and vice versa: Activity and reliance on God are two halves of a whole, and neither is complete without the other, just as, in many midrashic texts, the male and female are incomplete without each other. (An example of this is the midrash where man and woman were originally one being and are literally two halves of a whole - a tale that echoes Plato's Symposium), and just as the family sphere, associated with women, is incomplete without the more public sphere associated with men - i.e. each paradigm of Pesach is incomplete with out the other.
This is essentially a reading of a female text into a patriarchal ideal, in which it is circumcision that signifies the covenant, that enables redemption, protects from death, and enables one to engage in worship of the Divine by eating the sacrifice. If the blood of the womb-shaped doorpost is truly circumcision blood, then it is only by swabbing the male (milah blood) over the female (doorpost as womb), that protection is achieved, for the woman, who bleeds every month and cradles life between her thighs, is unknowable, and therefore, dangerous.
The association of women with both death and life can be seen from many ancient cultures, where women were associated with earth - a place both of life (flowers, fruit, wheat, etc.) and death (burial), and it was often women who were tasked with communicating with the dead (for example, the baalat ov in Shmuel). Womens' bodies, portals between the worlds of pre-birth and life*, where expected to act as portals between the worlds of life and death as well. Death meant going down towards "sheol", symbolizing both going down into the earth, but also, entering sheilah, the great unknown. for death, like women, represented a vast unknowable.
In this context, one wonders if it is purely coincidental that in so many myths, it is women who bring evil in the world through knowledge -whether it is Eve bringing knowledge of good and evil, or Pandora bringing knowledge of various ills when she opens her box. Here, women are uncovering and revealing, whereas patriarchal society has long had a need to conceal women by keeping them away from the public sphere and covered in modest clothing. Women are also more "hidden" than men in that, unlike men, women have their gonads inside of their bodies. Is it pure coincidence that societies so obsessed with covering up and protecting women have mythologies that put women in a situation of revealing and exposing, that cultures that fear the unknowability of women have them as givers of the original knowledge?
Here are some mythological figures to consider:
- Sphinx – a female guardian of knowledge, with the power both to reveal and to conceal, who can kill you if you give a wrong answer
- Persephone/Demeter – represent both death/underworld and spring/rebirth/harvest. The seasons, the earth's lifecycle, is based on a mother-daughter relationship: When Persephone is in a world of death, her mother can not bring forth life (i.e. can not mother), resulting in winter. The agricultural cycle is also like the cycle of a woman's body, which at times flowers and at time hibernates. Each menstrual cycle results in loss of life (winter) that brings upon it a new cycle, with new potential to conceive (spring).This mythic story associates women both with trees and flora (life), and with the earth (both death and life)
- Furies are women
- Fates are women – determiners of both life and death
- Circe – can grant immorality, but this immorality is death in the sense that one is frozen in time/place, bringing the end of life as man knows it. Thus, her sexual power grants both life and death, or rather, life as death.
- Eden – links women, who bring both knowledge and death into world, with life (Chava is "the mother of all life", to sex (since a knowledge of nakedness immediately follows eating of the fruit) but the nature of the link is unclear.
I am still not sure exactly what the link between these figures is, or why so many societies seem to have mythologized woman into life/death dualities associated with agriculture and knowledge, but I do believe that it is worth pondering.
* I am using these terms for convenience; the question of if/when a fetus becomes life, and the qualitative difference between life in vitro and life post vitro is beyond the scope of this essay.
