Pain That Belongs to Life

About This Talk

Chapter 7 treats bleeding connected with childbirth and closes with the Sages' calculations of extended bleeding. The blood of the throes, bleeding that comes with labor pains, makes a woman a niddah if it comes in her days of niddah but leaves her pure in her days of zivah, since the verse "when blood flows within her flesh" teaches that the blood must come from herself and not because of a child; this applies only when she gives birth to a living child, not when she miscarries, and later generations treated such bleeding as impure. Bleeding with continuous pain for up to fourteen days before birth is blood of the throes, while bleeding that began fifteen or more days before is zivah; if after three days of bleeding with pain the pains stop and she is at ease for twenty-four hours, she is a zavah. The general principle is that difficulty close to the birth attributes the bleeding to the birth and ease close to the birth does not, and the day of birth itself always counts as a day of difficulty; a doubtful miscarriage after two days of bleeding leaves her status in doubt. A woman who gives birth while a zavah counts seven clean days, immerses at night and brings both a zavah's offering and a childbirth offering, and only then do the laws of pure blood apply; after a daughter she is forbidden until the fifteenth night even if her count ends sooner, since the days after birth and days of niddah without bleeding count toward the seven. If she counted seven clean days and delayed immersion, bleeding afterwards does not change her status. Bleeding that comes from a new pregnancy within the eighty days of pure blood is pure until the miscarriage, and with twins she counts from the second. The blood of the throes or the birth itself during a zavah's count does not cancel it, and in the Rambam's view those days are counted, against the view of the Ra'avad; "if she has become pure from her zivah" teaches that other impurities such as childbirth, niddah or tzara'at do not cancel her count, and only zivah bleeding does. On this basis the Rambam explains how a woman can bleed for 114 consecutive days without becoming a major zavah, that bleeding after the days of childbirth begins a new set of days of niddah regardless of her previous vesatot, and the Sages' calculations for women with fixed patterns of bleeding and pure days: one and one permits four nights in eighteen days, two and two the eighth, twelfth, sixteenth and twentieth days, three through six leave her a permanent zavah after a few permitted days, a week and a week permits eighteen days in eighteen weeks or about a quarter of her days, eight and eight fifteen days in forty-eight, nine and nine eight days of every eighteen, and ten and ten or more as many permitted days as days of zivah. The commentators note that the Ramban's reading explains some of these passages more simply and that none of it applies in practice, since seven clean days are counted after any bleeding.