As many have pointed out, the
main problem in Luke’s description concerns his reference to the process of
their purification (καθαρισμοῦ αὐτῶν) when both Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to
the temple (2:22). The LXX to Leviticus 12:4 (cf. 12:2b) only explicitly speaks
of the days of her purification (καθάρσεως αὐτῆς), that is, the mother’s, while
never referring to the potential impurity the infant or the father could
acquire during or after the infant’s birth. Does the usage of the plural
possessive pronoun reveal Luke’s imprecise knowledge of Judaism?
. . .
There is more than silence,
however, that could lead a Jewish reader of the Second Temple period to
interpret Lev 12 as referring to the impurity of the mother as well as the
infant. If the impurity of a parturient is comparable to the impurity of a menstruant,
then it is reasonable to infer that both types of impurity are imparted in
similar ways. Just as a husband who lies with her wife during her menstruation
is defiled for seven days (Lev 15:24), so too, through analogy and inference we
might conclude that the infant can acquire the impurity of her mother through
contact with the blood emitted during childbirth.
Most importantly, Thiessen and
others before him argue that Jubilees as well as 4Q265 and 4Q266 extend
the impurity of the parturient to the infant. Jubilees 3:8–13 refers to
a curious story concerning the entry of Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden.
Adam has to wait until forty days are over before entering the Garden of Eden.
Likewise, Eve waits until eighty days before making her entry. Elsewhere in Jubilees,
the Garden of Eden is likened to the temple (Jub. 8:19). The connections
with the legislation of Lev 12 are obvious, and, as Thiessen suggests, the
author of Jubilees probably would have viewed newborn children as
impure, having to wait forty or eighty days before entering the sacred realm,
just as Adam and Eve, “newborn” creatures, as it were, wait until the time of
their impurity is fulfilled before entering the sanctuary of Eden.
After reconstructing 4Q265,
Joseph Baumgarten concludes that, like Jubilees, this fragment links the
legislation of the parturient in Lev 12 with the entry of Adam and Eve into
Eden, viewing the primordial garden as a holy place that functions as a paradigm
for the “acceptance of newly born infants of both sexes into the sacred
sphere.” Most interesting though is 4Q266 6 ii 10–11, which prohibits a mother
from nursing her newborn child and requires instead the service of a wet nurse.
Unlike Jubilees and 4Q265, this text denies that a newborn acquires
impurity at the moment of childbirth but assumes that an infant can
subsequently become impure through contact with the mother during her days of
impurity. Basing herself on this Qumranic evidence, Himmelfarb concludes that
“P must have shared the view that the parturient conveyed impurity to those who
touched her during the first stages of impurity. Surely it would not have
escaped P’s notice that the newborn baby could not avoid such contact.” She
explains the silence of the issue in Leviticus 12 in the following way: “The
consequences of impurity as specified in Leviticus 12 are hardly relevant to a
newborn, who is most unlikely to have the opportunity to enter the sanctuary or
touch holy things and who is certainly incapable of eating sacrificial meat and
other kinds of consecrated food.”
Luke, however, is set on
presenting Jesus in the temple, but cannot do so before the days of impurity
for both the mother and the infant are over. Otherwise, Luke would run
the risk of implying that Jesus and his family defiled the temple of Jerusalem
by being present therein before the days of purification were over. Thankfully,
Luke is familiar with all of these halakic intricacies to save himself such
embarrassment, wisely choosing to have the baby Jesus presented in the temple
only after the forty days of purification are over. (Isaac Wilk Oliver, “Torah Praxis after 70
C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke-Acts as Jewish Texts” [PhD Dissertation; The
University of Michigan, 2012], 502, 504-6)
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