By Water & Blood

Homily 8.2: The law of the woman who bears a child

“And the Lord spoke,” it says, “to Moses, saying: Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: Any woman who has conceived seed and borne a male shall be unclean seven days.” First let us consider according to the literal account whether it does not seem added as it were superfluously, “a woman who has received seed and borne a male,” as if she could bear a male otherwise than by conceiving seed. But it is not added superfluously. For to distinguish her who conceived and bore without seed, the lawgiver added this expression for the other women: so as not to designate as unclean every woman who had given birth, but her who had given birth after conceiving seed. To this can be added also that this law, which is written about uncleanness, pertains to women. But of Mary it is said that a virgin conceived and bore. Let women, then, bear the burdens of the law, but let virgins be held exempt from them. But if some clever person meets us and says that Mary too is called a woman in the Scriptures (for so the Apostle says: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law”), we shall answer him that in this the Apostle named “woman” not to indicate the loss of integrity but as a sign of sex; so that, since he was saying that the Son of God had been sent, he might at the same time explain that he had come into this world by the entrance common to all. Further, this word also denotes an age: namely that in which the female sex passes beyond the years of puberty and comes to the time when she seems fit for a husband. Just as, conversely, he is called a man who has passed the time of adolescence, even if he does not yet have a wife whose man he could be called; by which name even those are usually called whom no stain of union with a woman has touched. If, then, he too is rightly called a man by reason of manly age alone who has known union with no woman, how by the same consequence is not a virgin who has remained undefiled also named a woman by reason of maturity of age alone? Indeed Abraham too, when he sent his servant to Mesopotamia to the house of Bethuel to take from there a wife for his son Isaac, and the servant inquired rather carefully, said to him: “But if the woman will not follow me, shall I bring your son back there?” And he did not say, “if the virgin will not follow me.” Let this, then, be said by us about what we observed written, that the lawgiver did not add superfluously, “a woman if she has conceived seed and borne a son”; but that it is a mystical exception which set apart Mary alone from the other women, whose childbearing was not from the conception of seed but from the presence of the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High.