Leviticus 12: Forty Days for a Son and Eighty for a Daughter

Leviticus 12 gets read as a verdict on women, and I don't think it is one. I can't tell you what it is a verdict on instead, since the chapter never stops to explain itself, but nothing in these eight verses says the mother did anything wrong.

What it does say is that she's kept from the sanctuary and from anything hallowed for a counted number of days, and then she brings an offering that most of the book uses for people who have sinned. Those two facts sit next to each other with no comment between them. That's the part worth slowing down for, and it's most of this post.

What does Leviticus 12 actually ask of the mother?

Start with the numbers, because people argue about them before they've added them up. After a son she's unclean seven days (verse 2), the boy is circumcised on the eighth (verse 3), and she then continues "in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days." Seven plus thirty-three is forty. After a daughter it's two weeks and then "threescore and six days" (verse 5), which is fourteen plus sixty-six, so eighty.

And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled.

Leviticus 12:4

Two restrictions, and verse 2 calls these days "the separation for her infirmity," which tells you the chapter knows she's been through something and says nothing more about her condition than that.

The longer I look, the more I notice what it leaves out. The husband isn't mentioned, and neither is the bed she's lying on or the neighbors who bring a meal, and the baby isn't called unclean either, which surprised me when I went back to look for it. Leviticus 15 handles a woman's monthly cycle and there the rules spread outward, with anyone who touches her unclean until evening (15:19). Chapter 12 has no such rule, and I'd be slow to assume it carried over just because the two chapters are neighbors.

Forty days is close to the six weeks every doctor still gives a new mother, and Melissa lasted nine days after Ben before I came home and found her folding towels on the stairs. The chapter never mentions rest, so I won't call it a rest law, though a mother kept from the sanctuary for that long probably wasn't being handed many other obligations either. That's my guess and not the text's.

Then there's the timing, which I only caught on the third read. Verse 4 keeps her out of the sanctuary until the days are fulfilled, and verse 6 says what happens when they are: she comes "unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest." The door.

Her first errand after forty days or eighty is to walk back to the place she was kept from, and then the priest does the offering, since verse 7 says "Who shall offer it." She brings the animals and the rest isn't hers to carry.

Why does a mother bring a sin offering?

Verse 6 says that when the days are done she brings a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering, and that's the line that bothers people, which I understand.

Sin offering. After having a baby.

It reads wrong on a first pass and it still reads a little wrong on the fifth, and the only way I know to handle that is to go find where else the book uses the phrase and see who's standing there.

In Leviticus 5 the sin offering comes attached to a confession. The man who's guilty "shall confess that he hath sinned in that thing" (5:5), and then he brings the animal. Chapter 12 has no confession. It names no sin and no act of hers, and it tells her only that the priest will "make an atonement for her" and that she'll be cleansed "from the issue of her blood" (verse 7).

So the sin offering can't be a confession here. Leviticus 15 helps. A man with a running issue brings two birds on the eighth day, one for a sin offering and one for a burnt offering (15:14-15), and a woman with an issue of blood brings the same pair (15:29-30).

Nobody reads those as accusations.

Then comes the reason, a few verses on:

Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is among them.

Leviticus 15:31

My reading, and I'll call it that, is that the sin offering in these chapters has to do with the tabernacle and not with her conscience. Blood and birth and bodily issues all sit close to life and death, and the sanctuary has to be kept clear of them. The pairing isn't unusual anyway. Aaron brings a sin offering and a burnt offering on his first day at the altar, which I wrote about in Leviticus 9: Fourteen Verses Before the Fire.

The word "atonement" still sits oddly in a chapter with nobody to forgive. It has to mean something wider than forgiveness there, and I'm fairly sure of that much and not much beyond it.

Chapters 11 through 15 run together as one long stretch about clean and unclean, and I looked at the first of them in Leviticus 11 and the Pulled Pork Sandwich. Read in a row, "unclean" starts to look like a status people pass in and out of, mostly without blame.

Why is it eighty days for a daughter?

I've read the theories, a covenant one built on the circumcision, a medical one and a symbolic one about a daughter's own future, and the chapter gives no verse that picks between them.

What the text does say is in verses 6 and 7. The offering is the same "for a son, or for a daughter," and "This is the law for her that hath born a male or a female." The extra forty days sit on the mother's calendar and nobody's price goes up. I distrust the reading that says daughters were worth less, and I distrust just as much the one that says it was a gift of extra rest, because both are answers to a question the chapter never took up.

Melissa would have counted eighty days for Emma and for Lily and forty for Caleb and for Ben, which is the kind of arithmetic I did on my own house before I could stop myself, and the lamb would have cost the same every time and the priest would have said the same words over her, so whatever the difference in days was doing, it wasn't recorded as a difference in anything else.

That's all the chapter records.

What did Mary bring to the temple?

Verse 8 is my favorite verse in the chapter, and I think the chapter was built to arrive there. "And if she be not able to bring a lamb," the mother brings two turtles or two young pigeons instead, one for the burnt offering and one for the sin offering, "and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean."

She shall be clean.

That's the same word the woman with the lamb gets, with nothing taken off for the price. Leviticus 5 makes a similar allowance for the guilty man (5:7), so it's a pattern in the book, but here it's said about a woman six weeks or eleven out from giving birth who may well be short of money and wasn't going to be doing the shopping herself.

Luke shows a family using it, and Luke 2:23 even quotes the law that every firstborn male "shall be called holy to the Lord." First the eighth day, when "his name was called Jesus" (Luke 2:21), which matches the eighth day of Leviticus 12:3. Then the purification days, and the walk to Jerusalem:

And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord...

Luke 2:22

and two verses later the offering, "A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons" (Luke 2:24). Luke doesn't call them poor. He only names the birds, and they're the ones Leviticus 12:8 sets aside for someone who can't bring a lamb, so most readers draw the conclusion, and I think it's a fair one. Luke records it without apology. Mary came at the end of her days with the cheaper offering, and nobody in the passage treats that as less.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Leviticus 12 treat childbirth as a sin?

Not that I can find. No sin is named and nothing is confessed, and the offerings are the same for a boy or a girl. The sin offering is odd to our ears, but Leviticus 15 asks the same pair of birds of a man and a woman with bodily issues, and I read all of them as being about the tabernacle.

Does "unclean" mean what it sounds like?

In this chapter it means kept from the sanctuary and from hallowed things for a number of days. The same word covers a man with an issue (Leviticus 15:2) and anyone who touches a carcass (Leviticus 11:24), and plenty of those people did nothing wrong. It's closer to a status than an insult, though I wouldn't have enjoyed hearing it said about me or about anyone I love.

Do Latter-day Saints follow this law today?

No. Animal sacrifice under the Law of Moses isn't practiced, and the usual Latter-day Saint reading is that they pointed toward Christ and were fulfilled in him. A mother today comes back to church when she feels up to it and nobody counts the days for her.

If you read this chapter, read chapter 15 the same morning, since half of what looks strange in 12 is explained there. Leave the theories about the eighty days in pencil, mine included, because the chapter doesn't give one. And read verse 8 last.

— D.