I’ve always wondered what the story of the bleeding woman meant in the Gospels. There are three different accounts: Matthew 9:18-26, Mark 5:21-43, and Luke 8:41-54. All three detail Jesus meeting a leader of the congregation named Ya’ir whose daughter is dead, so Jesus goes to his house, but on the way a woman who’s had a 12-year menstrual blood (niddah) touches his garment and is cured. Jesus then goes to the Ya’ir’s house and declares his daughter is asleep, she wakes up, and all are amazed.
There are some subtle differences between the accounts. Matthew’s is the least detailed, with no mention of whom Jesus brings to Yair’s house. Mark’s account is the most detailed, as it mentions whom Jesus brought as well as the daughter’s age (12). Luke’s is basically the same as Mark’s only without mentioning the daughter’s age.
I like to try and read these stories through the 4 layers: peshat (plain), remez (hinted), derash (moral), and sod (secretive). The peshat reading is simple: Jesus cures two people because He can perform miracles. The remez reading is more allegorical: by touching Jesus’s “garment” the woman might’ve touched his tzitzit which could be commentary on the tzitzit themselves or on Jesus’s status as the High Priest. The derash is more moralistic: if one has faith, like the bleeding woman, and like the girl’s father, then we can enjoy the miracles of the faith.
The sod (secretive interpretation) I am having difficulty with, but it seems obvious that these two stories are interconnected because they are both told in the same “intercut” fashion in all three accounts. The only thing I can assume is that the bleeding woman is somehow related to Ya’ir’s daughter, not in a kinship way (there’s no indication the woman knows the girl), but in some kind of exchange: Ya’ir’s daughter is dead, but a bleeding woman intervenes and is healed, and then Ya’ir’s daughter is healed.
The first thing that has to be remembered was that a “bleeding woman” implies that she has an unnatural menstrual cycle here, which required an offering in the Torah, since ungainly bloodshed had to be atoned for until it ceased.
Leviticus 15:19-33
19 “Whenever a woman has her menstrual period, she will be ceremonially unclean for seven days. Anyone who touches her during that time will be unclean until evening.
20 Anything on which the woman lies or sits during the time of her period will be unclean.
21 If any of you touch her bed, you must wash your clothes and bathe yourself in water, and you will remain unclean until evening.
22 If you touch any object she has sat on, you must wash your clothes and bathe yourself in water, and you will remain unclean until evening.
23 This includes her bed or any other object she has sat on; you will be unclean until evening if you touch it.
24 If a man has sexual intercourse with her and her blood touches him, her menstrual impurity will be transmitted to him. He will remain unclean for seven days, and any bed on which he lies will be unclean.
25 “If a woman has a flow of blood for many days that is unrelated to her menstrual period, or if the blood continues beyond the normal period, she is ceremonially unclean. As during her menstrual period, the woman will be unclean as long as the discharge continues.
26 Any bed she lies on and any object she sits on during that time will be unclean, just as during her normal menstrual period.
27 If any of you touch these things, you will be ceremonially unclean. You must wash your clothes and bathe yourself in water, and you will remain unclean until evening.
28 “When the woman’s bleeding stops, she must count off seven days. Then she will be ceremonially clean.
29 On the eighth day she must bring two turtledoves or two young pigeons and present them to the priest at the entrance of the Tabernacle.
30 The priest will offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. Through this process, the priest will purify her before the LORD for the ceremonial impurity caused by her bleeding.
31 “This is how you will guard the people of Israel from ceremonial uncleanness. Otherwise they would die, for their impurity would defile my Tabernacle that stands among them.
32 These are the instructions for dealing with anyone who has a bodily discharge—a man who is unclean because of an emission of semen
33 or a woman during her menstrual period. It applies to any man or woman who has a bodily discharge, and to a man who has sexual intercourse with a woman who is ceremonially unclean.”
If she had touched a priest on his way to Temple, the priest would contract her blood contagion and no longer be able to perform his duties. He would now have to make a set of sin and burnt offerings, and the court might determine that the woman owed whatever damages he incurred as a result.
Note that according to Luke 1, Elisheva (John the Baptist’s mother) was an Aaronide; and Mary was her “relation” (Greek sungenes Strong’s G4772) meaning they were blood related. This would mean that Mary is Aaronide. If she conceived of Jesus as a virgin, then Jesus has no physical Judean blood from Joseph, Mary’s husband, but everyone thinks that Jesus is Judean, presumably because an Israelite’s family was reckoned at the time through the father’s line, and this was the custom of pater familias in Rome. That’s how the census was conducted anyway. We would assume that during the census, Joseph would show up as head of household, the Roman censor would log Joseph as having a wife Mary (who is now Judean through marriage) and Jesus, Jacob, and his other sons. All of them are logged as “Judean.”
(De Coulanges’ The Ancient City details how the Roman census worked: it was a sort of pagan Yom Kippur which not only catalogued all Roman citizens but also noted their gens (bloodlines). The regular census was a Roman ritual which gathered all these heads of households (kind of the same thing as you mark on your tax forms) who are supposed to be worshipping properly, but just in case they aren’t, the censor slaughters some animals in the presence of the citizenry to atone for any potential religious malpractice that might anger the heroes, gods, ancestors, etc. that each Roman pater was responsible for. If you didn’t show up for the census, you might be worshipping incorrectly and bringing some spiritual curse into Rome, so they would punish you by removing inheritance, imposing fines, canceling citizenship, etc. The censor’s offering cleansed the paters, who by proxy automatically cleanse their relative households.)
So by both Roman and Israelite custom, Jesus is assumed to be wholly and purely Judean. Any land Joseph owns is to be handed down to Jesus and His brothers. But in reality, Jesus has Aaronide blood since His lineage can only be reckoned from His mother’s side. That means He is of the Aaronide priesthood by blood, but nobody knows it. He also gets no land inheritance, since Aaronide (and Levites in general) get the priesthood as an inheritance. (The Gospels never clearly indicate that He knows He’s an Aaronide either, only that there are bigger things coming for Him, which makes the reading all the more fascinating.)
If we assume that Jesus is an Aaronide, and that He is the High Priest (according to Hebrews), then He would be contaminated by this woman. If His mission is to get through to the Cross so He can become the High Priest, then this would ruin His mission. However, what we keep seeing is that in every situation, whenever something comes His way that might contaminate Him and ruin this mission, the contagion is miraculously removed, either deliberately by Himself, or inadvertently as in the case of the bleeding woman. In this situation, we can only assume that He doesn’t perform the miracle directly: the miracle has to be performed. Or, more concretely, the woman must be made clean so that His mission is not compromised. Whether this is imposed from the outside (from God/Yahweh) or through some Priestly Dynamics that undergirds all spiritual life on earth, the Gospels never say. They only say that miracles are happening, and it’s almost always to ensure that Jesus never encounters contagion (which includes encountering the dead, lepers, or even people who are deformed like paralytics or the blind, as per the High Priest laws forbidding service to anyone with deformities). Any of these would compromise His mission.
So with this we can assume that, by this ancient blood-logic that the bleeding woman had to be healed. But we’re still faced with the mystery of why this story is always stuck in the middle of the other story, that of Ya’ir’s dead daughter. Mark gives a valuable hint, thrown in almost offhandedly in the second to last verse of the chapter: the girl was 12 years old, the same length of years as the bleeding woman’s affliction.
What could this mean? Did the bleeding woman somehow pay for the young girl’s blood? Is Jesus a sort of blood broker for this exchange? Is He able to capture a debtor’s blood debt, provided the debtor grants this debt to Him, serving as a sort of blood-champion, and then use this blood to offset someone else’s debt? Is this how all blood debt will be reckoned in a second coming? Does it all balance out somehow? Are the woman and the girl somehow bound together by blood before this whole scene occurs? The sod interpretation is wrapped up in this somewhere, but I don’t think I even have the right understanding of space-time (or blood-time) to understand it. However, the equating of blood with blood is a theme we see not only throughout the Bible, but in every ancient society ever. Animal blood is paid for human blood, presumably because it’s the same stuff. “Red” is always the first non-shade color term, before which everything tends to be described as “blood-colored”. All people used to understand this stuff, but I feel like my language is too far removed from theirs to have even a white belt-level understanding of blood accounting.
And I think this is why the Gospels continue to be misunderstood as stories of a wise man wandering around Israel doing miracles. There’s a definite theme to these miracles. He never cures lacerations or broken bones, and He seems not to go too far out of His way to do them. The Gospel authors don’t even really say much about Jesus as a high priest either. Only in the anonymously-written book of Hebrews do we get this interpretation. Either the Gospel authors were at a loss for what to make of this Man, or they deliberately avoided mentioning anything about the Aaronide priesthood, perhaps to avoid scandal at the time.
In modern society, we like to impose our modern views on what it all meant. I believe a better starting point would be to at least understand blood accounting as it’s described in the Torah, the kind of accounting that Jesus and His followers would have understood very well at the time. Because if my theory is correct, Jesus isn’t performing miracles: the path is being made for Him to go to into the inner Temple; a perfect priesthood is being forged on earth, not directly by Him, but for Him. I think this will come as scandalous to many modern believers who think that Jesus was a miracle-worker on earth. Really, the miracles must be situated in their proper context, away from the magic show-style portrayal Hollywood has given them. We have turned Jesus into a sort of Homeric hero, a sort of shapeshifter who creates a new religion. I hear it all the time, that Jesus does such and such things in the world. I’m not sure that’s true: it seems as though, as a High Priest, He is capable of reckoning blood debt in a new way. Instead of a new religion, He appears ot have established a new Temple. It’d be like the Fed removing the major banks and introducing a new kind of distributed ledger system that improved liquidity or something. It would still be the Fed, but you’d just interface with them differently.
What that interface is with the High Priesthood detailed in Hebrews, I still have no idea. Many will establish Churches with priesthoods that claim to be the interfaces, but these seem at least a step removed at best, complete counterfeits at worst. All I can assume is that, as in the case with the Fed, the old banks are gone, but debt is still circulating. Lots of people seem to be racking up debt, and they’re going to these counterfeit, paycheck-cashing places to try and offload debt, but this doesn’t actually work: they only end up further underwater. This is causing all kinds of aberrant issues. But once we realize there are fairly straightforward means for offloading this debt through the new ledger, and once we realize there are simple means for avoiding incurring additional debt, then by definition we are already interfacing with this new debt-broker; he is handling it all for you because he’s the only one you’re supposed to going to. When you find yourself underwater in debt, you realize, “Oh yeah, the new broker guy handles all this.”
Miracle workers appear everywhere in history, but never is there a story of such a Man who must go from point A to point B to fulfill His mission, and the world must conform, or else there is no world.
Today is Yom Kippur.