S2E6: Bad Blood: The Period Talk in Rabbinic Judaism and Zoroastrianism

With Dr. Shai Secunda

Join our conversation with Dr. Shai Secunda about the Babylonian rabbis’ science of blood, breaking taboos through sex education, and menstruation as a cure for rabies.

Today, taboos about menstruation keep thousands of girls from attending school. For Jewish sages in late antique Persia, such beliefs led to laws that required women to stay away from their husbands during their periods and to wash at prescribed times. (Whether women followed these laws is another question!) Blood could pollute, yet it could also purify. And practices around menstruation may have helped religious communities define their identity.

“Perhaps menstruation functions for women as a space of asserting religious identity. Jewish women were not circumcised, but they did have this thing that was related somehow to their gender. And perhaps that was one of the ways in which they built identity out of this realm of ritual.”

— Dr. Shai Secunda

BIO

Dr. Shai Secunda is Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College. He earned a bachelor's degree in Talmudic Literature from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a master's in Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA and PhD from Yeshiva University. He was previously the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, and he served as a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Shai has written two books, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context. The latter was a finalist for the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Shai has also edited two volumes on Jewish and Iranian studies.

• Transcript

  [Podcast theme music begins]

  Rebekah Haigh: Welcome to Women Who Went Before,  a gynocentric quest into the ancient world! I’m Rebekah Haigh—

  Emily Chesley: —and I’m Emily Chesley—

  Rebekah: —scholars, friends, and your hosts.

  [music interlude] 

  Rebekah: In today’s episode, “Bad Blood: The Period Talk in Rabbinic Judaism and Zoroastrianism,” we talk with Dr. Shai Secunda about the rabbis’ science of blood, breaking taboos through sex education, and menstruation as a cure for rabies.

  [music interlude]

  Emily: Periods are an expensive fact of biology.  Over the course of her lifetime,  a  woman will menstruate for an estimated seven years.[1]  That’s more than 9,000 tampons and roughly $1,800 US dollars.[2] According to Allied Market Research, the global feminine hygiene market was valued at $38.9 billion in 2020, and it’s estimated to grow to more than $68 billion by 2030.[3]

  Rebekah: Despite the massive market and marketing campaigns many women find their lives seriously disrupted by lack of period supplies. In a 2012 study of schoolgirls in Ghana, students reported missing 3 to 5 days of school every month because of insufficient period care items. The researchers explained, “These girls used ‘found’ cloth instead of pads. They had limited access to soap and water to keep cloth clean and no private space for drying. Cloth was unreliable for the distance to school they had to travel and began to smell after a few days. They generally chose to stay home.”[4] Similarly in Uganda, girls’ school enrollment drops off dramatically between primary school and high school: from 90% of girls enrolled in primary school to only 22% enrolled in high schools, a trend researchers attribute partly to issues with managing menstruation. 

  Emily: In parts of the ancient world, too, menstrual blood created problems. At least according to the men. According to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, an eclectic collection of stories he’d heard, menstrual blood could turn grapes sour, make crops barren, dim mirrors, rust iron, kill bees, and drive dogs mad (HN 7.15.64–65). But like poison, sometimes the best cure was the thing itself. Pliny promoted using menstrual blood on doorposts to ward off magic (HN 28.23.85–86).[5] He also recommended menstrual blood as the go-to cure for those rabid dog bites (HN  28.23.84).[6]  Who knew women had so much power flowing through us?

  Rebekah: So too in ancient Judaism. Life was in the blood  (Lev 17:14), and so blood was potent. It could both contaminate and purify. While men could also become ritually impure from bodily fluids,[7] for women this would have happened on the regular: at least a week each month. 

  According to Leviticus, childbirth, sex, and menstruation could all make a woman temporarily impure (Lev 15, 17). If she came into contact with certain objects and people during her period (including her husband), they could become impure (Lev 15:24; 18:19). To avoid contaminating others, menstruating women were supposed to keep themselves separated for seven days (Lev 15:19–23). Like in the first phase of the pandemic when we were leaving our groceries in the garage for three days and wiping down bags with Lysol. In the Bible, impurity mattered because it could defile the Temple. It’s important to understand, though, that “impurity” is not the same thing as “sin,” and we shouldn’t assume any moral connections to these ritual separations.[8]

  Emily: When the second Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 CE, Jewish communities had to rethink biblical rules for their own new context. In the centuries that followed, rabbis adapted and expanded the biblical purity laws into the menstrual rules of Niddah.[9] According to the sages, after women stopped menstruating, they were to undergo purification through a ritual bath (or a mikveh). The rabbis spent a lot of time legislating what counts as menstrual blood and how a woman should observe her menstrual period. Charlotte Fonrobert points out that the rabbis did not ban women from social life or bar them from studying the Torah, but instead focus on preventing husbands from sleeping with their menstruating wives and in so doing breaking the Torah.[10] Concerns with purity and blood lingered, but what was threatened by the impurity had shifted: no longer the Temple but the Torah.

  Rebekah: Women in late antique Judaism could have leveraged these laws to their advantage. The Tosefta preserves a story where a man named Shmu’el wants to sleep with his wife, but she tells him “I am in a status of impurity.” The next day, though, she says she is available, and Shmu’el questions her state of purity. She explains, “Yesterday I did not have the same strength as today” (pKet 2:5, 26c, trans. Fonrobert, 2000). She uses the law to give an excuse for not being in the mood.[11]

  Emily: As with all rabbinic texts, we are fairly uncertain if and how carefully women followed the rabbis’ instructions. A Christian text from the third-century CE, the Didascalia Apostolorum, claims that Jewish converts strictly observed menstrual customs: these women avoided prayer, studying the scripture, and the Eucharist for seven days on their periods. Fonrobert sees this as a choice to follow the earlier and stricter biblical legislation, even though by that point in time the rabbis permitted menstruating women to study the Torah (t.Ber 2:13).[12] It's always complicated to read social history from inter-religious polemics like this, but theDidascalia may indicate that some Jewish women actually followed these self-restrictions. Another clue may come from the archaeological record: stepped stone baths called mikvot have been excavated in Palestine, more than 600 by one count.[13] Scholars hotly debate them, but some have speculated that Jewish and Samaritan women washed in the baths for ritual purification on occasion.[14] Some women may have practiced some kind of purification, even if not exactly as the rabbis wrote about. These practices of niddah continue among observant Orthodox Jewish communities today, where women wash at the mikvot before and after consummating their marriage.[15]

  Rebekah: As our guest today points out, the world of rabbinic Judaism, and its worries about menstrual blood, was also the world of Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Mandeans and other religious movements. For a millenia, Jews had lived in the Persian Empire under a succession of different rulers. First the Achaemenids, then the Greek Seleucids and the Parthians. The Sasanian Empire was the last empire in Persia before the Muslim conquests, reigning from 224 to 651 CE. Under Shah Ardashir I, the dynasty’s founder, the Sasanians began reviving traditional Iranian culture after hundreds of years of Greek influence. This reinstatement led to a revival of Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic faith that worshiped Ohrmazd and had been initially founded sometime between 1500–1000 BCE.  A religion of the aristocratic classes,[16] some of its professed ideas and practices overlapped with Judaism—like a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the idea that each person must choose between them, and a concern for purity and pollution.

  Emily: Mandaism was another religion practiced in late antique Mesopotamia and Persia. Its scriptures claim it emerged from a Jewish-Christian sect perhaps in Palestine or Syria and that followers relocated to Mesopotamia in the second century CE after persecutions by the Roman emperor Hadrian. Followers of John the Baptist, Mandeans held a strongly dualist view of the world with a stark difference between good and evil—like Zoroastrians and another Persian religion, Manichaeism. In the fourth century, a Mandaic leader in Babylon named Ado united several sects into one group. The most distinctive Mandean ritual was baptism, and its adherents were associated with ritual purity and washing.[17] Like the rabbis and the Zoroastrians, the Mandeans cared about purity and the body.

  Rebekah: Dr. Shai Secundais Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College. He earned a bachelor's degree in Talmudic Literature from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a master's in Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA and PhD from Yeshiva University. He was the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, and he served as a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Shai has authored two books: The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context. The latter was a finalist for the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. He also edited two volumes on Jewish and Iranian studies. Let’s jump into our conversation with Shai!

  [podcast theme music plays]

  Emily: When Westerners typically think about menstruation today, we often consider a monthly occurrence where a woman sheds the lining of her uterus for a few days (usually with pain, I might add!), after which her body returns to a non-bloody, quote-un-quote “normal” state. But in ancient Mesopotamia, blood didn't primarily signify a missed window of fertility. You mention the Wisdom of Solomon (7:2), a Jewish text from the 1st century CE or BCE, preserves a particularly evocative take. “In my mother’s womb I was sculpted into flesh during a ten months’ space, curdled in blood by virile seed and the pleasure that is joined with sleep.”[18] So how did the Sasanian communities that you study think about women's blood, and what was blood's role in conception? 

  Shai Secunda: One of the reasons why I focus on those questions in the book, which is otherwise an exploration of legal development, is because I think the way our ancestors thought about the body—first of all is not the same as we think about it (it sounds obvious, but sometimes we need to remember that), but also the way in which they lived in the body, they thought about the body, did affect the way in which they developed the legal system, a ritual system, and that sort of thing. So that's why I felt it was so necessary to kind of think about those questions. 

  And it's a mess in terms of trying to reconstruct what in the Sasanian worlds (we could call it eastern late antiquity) what they thought about menstruation, what it was, what it signified. In fact I had very little with which to reconstruct. There’re no sort of relevant passages in medical manuals from the particular region that I'm studying in. So it's really reading and coming across quotes like the one that you raised from Wisdom of Solomon—which is not from the Sasanian Empire, but actually was composed earlier and further west. But working with those texts and then trying to position them among the very well known medical traditions that we do have access to from the classical world, things like Aristotle, the Hippocratics, Galen, it's possible to say something about what menstruation meant.

  And the first thing that you mentioned is one hundred percent true. It is an important reminder that, to my knowledge, menstruation was never seen as a missed opportunity for life as it has been discussed actually by some theologians, Jewish and otherwise. That is not a way that they're conceiving of it. 

  One strain that existed—and it's actually well attested in late antiquity and in the Jewish world in particular—was Aristotle's approach. You could even hear echoes of it in Wisdom of Solomon. So first of all, the blood is matter, right. It is going to be actualized, curdled even. The use of the word “curdled” is important because there's a very old metaphor—comes up also in the Book of Job, but also is really part of the model or the metaphor that Aristotle uses—that when this seed goes into the womb as he describes it, then a process begins by which this matter, the blood which exists in the womb, is turned into an embryo and ultimately a human life. So that is a strain that exists in ancient Jewish texts. In fact, it seems to be, it was the dominant way that the western part of the rabbinic world in Palestine thought about the processes. So there's some midrash that I quote as well, which focuses also on periodic leaking, sort of how they describe it, unless this process, which they describe as like the making of cheese, begins through the fertilization of the seed. 

  What's interesting to me because my focus is on the Sasanian world is that I, despite the fact that the rabbinic text that I'm most interested in (the Talmud) is built on earlier Palestinian rabbinic texts and one would think that they would adopt that Aristotelian scheme, that's not really what we find. And instead we have something like a notion, a more active notion that connects menstruation or fluid that is closely associated with menstruation with some form of seed. 

  So just one example. And it's a subtle example, but it shows how these texts build on earlier traditions but move in new directions. One of the dominant embryological theories in ancient rabbinic texts is that there are three partners in the creation of human life. There is God, there is the woman, and there is the man. And each of these parties contribute three different things. That's already kind of an established motif, and even kind of crystallized as a text in by the 3rd century in Palestine. 

  But it's described in a sort of very passive way. The way these partners give their elements is not really detailed. In the Babylonian Talmud it's described, at least when it comes to the man and the woman, not God, as inseminating. So, you know, through the male contribution, the male inseminates the white aspects of the body: the teeth, and other parts which they imagined were related to the contribution of semen. And the women inseminated red, and gave all of these red elements, including the blood that would circulate in the body. So you can sort of see there that there's the beginning of a shift in these texts moving away from blood in this Aristotelian model being the matter in which the semen sort of actualizes and creates form, into a sort of more active role. 

  What that active role was is very difficult to figure out. One hint or one I should say system that I looked at was one that's developed by the Greek-writing physician Galen. He, perhaps building on some of the Hippocratic thinking, rejects first of all the Aristotelian model, but his model is very confusing. It does seem to have a more active role for the female contribution. There is some association with menstrual blood, depending on how you read different passages. And that too shows up in Zoroastrian texts. 

  So one of the most I think interesting sources we have from the Sasanian Empire on, first of all embryology in general, and specifically this question of what menstruation is, is in a text that's written composed in Middle Persian by Zoroastrian priests, Zoroastrian scholars we could think of them as. Of course, Zoroastrianism is an ancient Iranian religion, but it was developing quite intensely during late antiquity. And it was interested in knowledge coming from various places, perhaps from Galen. We have other evidence that they're translating Greek texts. Perhaps this text is a dialogue with Galenic texts. And it describes in great detail again this question of contribution. What is the male seed bring? What is the female seed bring? And they have this notion of female seed. There does seem to be specifically within this Sasanian Empire a notion of a more active female seed which bears some relationship with menstrual blood. 

  This is a problem for these thinkers because they also view menstrual blood as creating restrictions on sex. So it's almost a paradox. How can you have sex if you're going to then have some encounter with something like menstrual blood, which normally you can't have sex during? But it does seem that this paradox is present. And it also brings in the question of female desire and menstruation, which is almost entirely omitted from the Aristotelian model. 

  So the last kind of interesting idea that develops I think along this line in the Talmud is a notion of, transmitted as blood of desire. Blood of desire again presents a sort of legal problem for the rabbis. But the notion of blood of desire seems to come from this idea that during sexual excitement the woman will emit some kind of blood that seems very similar to menstruation. And they need to figure this out. This even comes up in a colorful story that the rabbis tell about King Shapur II, the very powerful, important Sasanian king in the 4th century, having a conversation with his mother Ifra Hormizd, and talking about how good the rabbis are diagnosing different kinds of blood. One of the kinds of blood that comes up is this blood of desire. 

  Rebekah: As a follow up question I'm curious, how are they thinking about this model? Is she just always full of blood like always? 

  Shai: Yes. So again, we only sort of have hints about what they thought about the architecture of the female body. A lot of what we have, if we're speaking specifically of the Jewish texts, is these architectural models that are described in the Mishnah. They're interested in the interiority of it mainly for legal reasons. This develops a certain scheme of thinking about the blood moving between rooms. 

  And this is really interestingly written about by two important scholars on this topic, Charlotte Fonrobert, who wrote a book called Menstrual Impurity that in many ways inspired my book, and Cynthia Baker, who wrote a book called Rebuilding The House of Israel, and is very interested specifically not only the house as sort of the physical domestic space (Baker as has worked as an archaeologist), but also in the architectural metaphors that they used to understand the movement of blood. 

  Now, I already mentioned the Aristotelian model that appears in the rabbinic midrash from Palestine, where it does seem to be, blood fills up in the womb over the course of the month and then if it's not fertilized and the process does not begin, it leaks out. So you have that in Palestine in a highly misogynistic text that appears in the Talmud—but I have to say it's an interesting one specifically for these questions—describes women as a skin flask filled with filth. And the mouth–-and it's clear it's talking about the vaginal mouth—is filled with blood. And men run after them. 

  So first of all, again it's a troubling text to talk about, but it is interesting in terms of reconstructing how some people were thinking about the female body. The idea of this skin flask within, you know, the womb of course corresponds to things that we know in in the classical world, including myths. And there's more to talk about there. Hut they are interested in and troubled by this leaking, open mouth, which they don't know what to do, because these texts are written by men in a patriarchal society where the whole notion of menstruation is physiologically something they don't personally experience. And it comes with all kinds of horror and questions and misogyny. 

  And it sort of leads to this obviously completely inaccurate physiological notion of this constantly leaking thing. However, the idea that they connected to sort of men running after women despite this does seem to relate to the notion of desire and menstrual blood. There's a notion of disgust. How could this be if we have this misogynistic way of thinking about women that men still run after them? But they also acknowledge that the fluid that's leaking seems to have something to do with desire. At least, that's my reading of the source. 

  Rebekah: For Jewish and Zoroastrian communities in Sasanian Persia, blood could bring forth not only purity and life, but also impurity. In one Middle Persian text you cite, the Foul Spirit Ahrimen has sex with Jeh, the “Whore of Evil Tradition,” who then defiles women, and they in turn defile men.[19] This story seems to paint menstruation as something tied to a primordial sin. And it becomes an impurity that women can transmit through contact. In what ways was a woman’s blood dangerous?

  Shai: There's a fascinating development that takes place both on the Zoroastrian side and on the rabbinic side in the Sasanian world, where there is a connection between either primordial evil or primordial sin. Practically speaking, there is a discourse of danger,as you mentioned. And there are very specific ways that menstrual blood is deemed dangerous, or menstruating women. So, for example, there's a few, a couple of [unclear word] Talmudic texts that seem to advise not walking between women, particularly when they're menstruating. 

  There are also on the Zoroastrian side discussions about the ability of the gaze of menstruants to affect the world. This, by the way, is something that appears also in classical texts, including Aristotle. Though it might be a later interpolation where women have the ability to even kind of change how mirrors look. There are some Zoroastrian passages that describe the presumed ability of menstruants to affect the world and damage the world, like crops, through their gaze. This again is something that appears— 

  Emily [commenting over]: Pliny. 

  Shai: Pliny. And lots of classical texts, they have a whole sort of metaphysics of it, because gaze is very important in Zoroastrianism, both in a ritual context, looking, priests looking at each other. Also, even in terms of impurity, not menstrual impurity but corpse impurity. Dogs are involved. And the gaze of dogs is beneficial to drive away demons. So gaze is important. And because of its importance it seems to also be a site of fear, where the gaze of the menstruant is problematic. 

  Perhaps for that reason, that Zoroastrian texts require (we don't know if they actually did this in fact) but require women to be apart from general society. And the fear seems to me that they'll look at fire. Fire is one of the most sacred elements in Zoroastrianism. In many ways it's a cult of fire. There are hymns to fire. Fire is worshiped through giving it sacred twigs. So the fear is that women when menstruating are sort of possessed by a demonic force—which relates to that myth that you referred to, Rebekah—will be able to sort of damage the fire. So there are a variety of ways in which this danger is manifest. 

  Again, it's troubling for us moderns to hear about these ideas of danger related to women just having regular physiological life. But it is, it's sort of noteworthy, I think, because it doesn't contradict the way in which the Sasanian world they thought about menstrual blood as relating to life, having this important role in creation of human life. I think because it was so marked, because they had this notion that it wasn't just sort of waiting to be fertilized but it was powerful in and of itself, unfortunately, it also led to these beliefs, which of course had a negative effect on women. 

  Emily: So maybe let's turn to some of those social practices around menstruation. In your book, you talk about this text, Videvdad 16:1–17. It talks about the banishment of an impure woman. She's distanced from the community and the sacred. Can you explore a little bit, first what do the texts tell us about menstrual practices in the communities of Sasanian Mesopotamia, which we've gotten into a little bit. And then as a follow up, I'm really interested, can we reconstruct actual women's menstrual practices from these texts. Did they— 

  Shai [commenting over]: Yeah. 

  Emily: Yeah. Were they isolating on their periods as the Zoroastrian directive texts were saying. For how long? Or was this more of a theory that we don't know if it was practiced. 

  Shai: Yes. So first of all, this is a key distinction between what the texts say and what actually was happening. 

  So first, just following up your question, I'll start with what we think the texts say. 

  And it's important just to say a quick thing about how these texts work. So a text like the Videvdad is actually really two texts. One is a text that's written in Avestan, an old Iranian language that dates to probably the first half of the first millennium BC. So quite old. And there is a text I should say, called the Videvdad that is written in Avestan. And you could open up that Avestan book. That will not tell us anything directly about the Sasanian world, which was from the 3rd to the 7th century of the Common Era many, many centuries later. However, the Videvdad also has a Middle Person rendition, which we know as the Pahlavi Videvdad which is a translation, but also is a discussion by named figures who we think lived in the late Sasanian period, perhaps in the 6th century, at least that's my argument. And they can tell us something about at least what certain Zoroastrian voices wanted to see happen vis à vis these practices.

  Once again, these are all men. Women are not part of this discourse. So that's very important when sort of trying to figure out what they want or what they expect. Also important is to remember, that they're both talking about what they want in the present, but they're also doing exegesis and interpretation and translation of these older Avestan texts.

  Those texts and that chapter open with the need to separate. And separation from the home and from regular society during this period is a key aspect of practices surrounding menstrual impurity in Zoroastrianism. It was in the older Avestan period and it was as well during the Sasanian period. And it seems quite demanding. It describes as soon as the woman discovers that she's menstruating, she has to change her clothes, go to a place of isolation, stay there for the duration of the period. Perhaps even an extra day or so, according to some of these texts, and then undergo a pretty significant purification process. That's what the texts say.

  Emily: Sure.

  Shai: The question is, can we know what actually was or was not happening in reality? And it's veryhard to know. 

  We do have reports from much later periods of what people like the Zoroastrians or the Mandeans, another neighboring community, were doing. And these are external reports. That still might not necessarily tell us what was happening, particularly if you're talking about a medieval observer—again, a man, so how much access he has and what he's really learning and seeing is questionable. But still, it is a sort of control on the texts being actualized or at least spoken about and perhaps practiced in the way those texts describe.

  So we have much later texts in the Zoroastrian contexts from, I think, the 15th century by European travelers. With the Mandeans, we have earlier Arabic texts dating all the way back to the 10th century. They pretty much correspond to what we find in the texts, but again, we don't know if that actually was happening in practice. 

  And then we do have one absolutely fascinating Mandean text, and that's why I mentioned that community. This text was composed in late antiquity. It is a kind of catalog of different religions in the region and their practices. And menstruation shows up in a bunch of the descriptions. Some of this stuff really looks almost exactly like what we find in the text, and some of it looks quite different. In fact, shockingly different, but maybe instructively. 

  So I'll just give kind of one example. The Zoroastrian text the Videvdad says that women should remove their regular clothes, put on special clothes that they'll wear during the period. And that's what the text says that they should do. The Mandean text complains that Zoroastrian women wear their clothes that they had on when they started to menstruate, and they say that they're not impure. Now in the past this was seen as either an inaccuracy or kind of an unfair critique of the Zoroastrian practice. But I think it points to a certain legalistic approach the Zoroastrian texts discuss, which is as long as the woman removes the clothes in a reasonable amount of time, they don't become legally impure. Even if she was wearing them when she started to menstruate. 

  So you get little hints of, if not what actually was happening, impressions of different systems and how different systems were trying to operate. But we know very, very little.

  As much as these texts are quite severe, it's interesting how they do make an attempt to use kind of legal fictions to create a more viable possibility. 

  I think that's important because one of the ways that these texts came to the West, like many texts from the East, is through missionaries, who came to places like India where there was and still is a very important Zoroastrian community, the Parsi community, and got their manuscripts, spoke with the people there, and came came up with impressions that were very often highly influenced by a sort of Protestant mindset. So they speak repeatedly about the Zoroastrian “inflexibility,” “severity,” lack of even legal creativity when dealing with things like purity. 

  So first of all, this is problematic to say the least when studying another religion, though, we're talking about figures who lived centuries ago. But also it misses some of what really is happening: which is, you do have a system that is quite demanding, but you also have attempts to kind of operate within it using various legal technologies and, which at least make it very, very interesting. 

  But still we're entirely within a world of text. First of all, written by an intellectual elite, the priests in the Zoroastrian context. And they were all men. So what they know, what they want, what they have access to, is extremely limiting if we wanna actually understand what was happening.

  Now one of the ways that we can do this—and this is done widely, particularly in the study of ancient and late ancient religion—is to sort of look for little hints of resistance or pushback, which one could assume would come from women. I mentioned Charlotte Fonrobert’s book earlier, Menstrual Impurity, and she really describes in helpful detail how this is done. Right, how you read against the grain to reconstruct perhaps what actually was happening. 

  I was able to sort of see places where perhaps women were pushing back, were, let's say, resisting the rabbinic attempt to monitor every aspect of what clearly is an intimate part of their lives. So earlier texts really have like a pretty intrusive regimen of when a woman needs to check and a whole kind of diagnostics. And then we see the texts retreating, sometimes perhaps reflecting women basically saying, “This is not your space.” 

  Again, this is speculative. There's actually a very big debate in the field. So I refer in my book to another scholar, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, who's written on the topic of gender in ancient Judaism, and his basic approach is we should only try to describe what it is that we can see and see clearly. And unfortunately, what we can see clearly is really just what the men are saying. 

  But Fonrobert insists—and I'm partial to her approach—that we should at least try as much as possible. It's contingent, but we should try as much as possible to reconstruct what was happening by looking for these sort of sites of resistance or pushback against the texts. 

  Emily: And a follow up, just because I'm curious, is there any material evidence that could speak to this at all? You know, I know in ancient Egypt there's very old hieroglyphics that might suggest birthing practices of women. And I know, obviously, Persia is a very different geographical and geological context, but...

  Shai: Yeah. So we don't really have clear material evidence. This actually is one of the things that Cynthia Baker talks about in her book, at least in reference to ancient Judaism. There had been a tendency of archaeologists to kind of map female spaces within Jewish homes and perhaps even spaces where presumably, but this is probably incorrect, rabbinic texts would expect them to be isolating. And she said there's no evidence for this at all. [chuckles] It's entirely scholarly imagination.

  And in terms of the space, we don't have examples of Zoroastrian quote-unquote “menstrual huts.” But mainly because how would you be able to identify them? 

  Emily: Sure, yeah.

  Shai: And also, you know, even things like feminine hygiene products, which the text sometimes refer to and are quite interesting, these are things that just wouldn't survive the centuries. So we have virtually nothing in terms of material evidence. And that, that really is why we’re reliant on texts by definition in an environment where women don't really have access to literacy and the ability to compose texts. So we can't really get around it by using material culture, which is a shame. 

  Rebekah: So we've talked in the podcast before about some of these rabbinic texts on women's purity. Some scholars read them as reflecting the concerns of male rabbis, as we've just discussed, and as has been a theme of our first season. Or it's an attempt by the rabbis to bring women's issues under male control. You use the phrase “blood science.” And in a comparative text, the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum, Syrian Christian women were taken to task because they were “scrupu­lous and desire[d]…to keep the rules governing nature, fluxes, and intercourse.”[20] The Christian author found them too legalistic and too Jewish. But did women take any initiative when it comes to their menstrual impurity?[21] Is this an all-male, interreligious, intercultural conversation purely, or did menstruation belong to women in any way that we can recover?

  Shai: So, there's a lot I could say. I'll try to focus on the notion of expertise. 

  I'll start with the rabbis. What they imagined was a kind of science. And Fonrobert actually made that term “blood science,” where they were experts, and they developed methods of diagnosis to determine whether blood was menstrual blood and therefore the women would be impure. And we have descriptions, primarily in Jewish texts but there is a reference in Jerome, a highly negative reference, but perhaps. 

  Emily [commenting over]: How surprising. [laughs]

  Shai: Yes, but it's interesting! Fonrobert said this must be kind of just a fantasy of his, but I'm not surebecause some of the rabbinic texts do refer to smelling, even tasting, right. This might seem strange, but actually to this day in chemistry, chemists will still use things like taste to be able to determine the properties of something. Of course, that's not going to work to actually determine whether something is “blood of desire,” something that doesn’t even exist! [Emily and Shai chuckle]. But the methods were there. And the methods seemed to testify to this desire: that the way they perceive this whole realm is one where experts can be in charge. 

  Now, I sort of argue that this was a site of considerable drama. I think there are two elements that are leading to the rabbis asserting their expertise, and also the rabbis developing such an extreme level of expertise that the thing almost collapses on themselves. In other words, they talk about the need to distinguish between things that you can't really distinguish between, and how difficult it is. I think the pressure is coming from two sources. 

  One is women. Because naturally this would be within the realm of women. Women are interested in their bodies. They want to understand their cycles. Maybe they also consider themselves part of the biblical and Jewish purity system. And yet the rabbis seem to kind of want to use expertise as a means of wresting control from the women, and sort of asserting order. “This is how it's done” I think that's one pressure point that leads to these extreme assertions of expertise. 

  And I think the Zoroastrian priests as well may have led to the rabbis needing to say “We're such great experts.” And one of the places I think we see that is the story I referred to a few minutes ago, where Ifra Hormizd, this woman who's described as the mother of King Shapur. We don't know what King Shapur’s mother's name was, maybe it really was Ifra Hormizd. It is a good Zoroastrian name that shows up in Aramaic incantation bowls, so we know at least that. She sends her blood samples to a rabbi named Rava, an important rabbi in the 4th century who actually lived in the metropolitan area where the Sasanian winter capital was, in Ctesiphon. She sends him things for him to diagnose, and she discusses the diagnosis with her son. 

  Now, this certainly is not an historic story, but it's a story that's doing cultural work. And I think the work it's doing is that the rabbis are saying, “Look, we're such experts that even the Sasanian Zoroastrian queen mother, she's consulting us. She's not going to her religious authorities; she's going to our authorities.” So I think kind of generally speaking, without getting into the whole process, the way the rabbis thought about and wanted to imagine how this realm of human life and ritual would work, was that they would be the experts. They would be in control. But they do kind of often know that they aren't really in control. [laughs] They can't really tell the difference between these different things. Women won't send the samples that they want to be sent. And that sort of thing.

  I'm happy to refer to the work of Charlotte Fonrobert. She has pointed to sort of two named women who appear in the Babylonian Talmud. Actually, one of them was not named, but is Abbaye's mother. Abbaye was another important 4th-century sage of the same generation of Rava whom I mentioned earlier. She was a kind of medical expert. And we have small collections of her advice, mainly having to do with women's health. And the question is sort of, how do you approach those texts and what kind of history can you get from them? But we certainly see that there was a desire to bring deep women's wisdom to gynecology, more generally.

  There's another figure and we have a name for her. And that is Yalta. Yalta is depicted as being married to a rabbi named Rabbi Nachman. He was a apparently politically powerful rabbi who was associated with the family of the exilarch. It's possible, in fact, that Yalta was the daughter of the exilarch, who was some kind of leader within the Sasanian system of the Jews, perhaps similar to the Catholicos in the Syriac Christian community, perhaps not it's hard to know. But she is described as taking the initiative exactly as you suggested. Women are bringing to her blood stains to examine and to determine whether they mean that the woman was menstruating or not. And the rabbis are sort of troubled by this. On the one hand, they recognize, because they have these earlier texts saying that, she was doing this with some kind of approval that this is okay. But on the other hand, what does this mean for their whole enterprise? So you have small passages that, whether or not they're historical in their details that there was a particular woman named Yalta who was doing these things, they almost certainly do reflect some kind of movement within the culture by women to wrest control, or at least to take the initiative with these things. 

  We don't have anything equivalent in the other texts I looked at for the Sasanian empire, so nothing like that in the Middle Persian texts. But the Middle Persian texts are different kinds of texts than the Talmud. They don't really tell stories very much at all about these sages. So you wouldn't kind of get these other voices in the same way that you do get in I guess a messier text like the Talmud. 

  Emily: You talk in your book about how differing cultural attitudes towards menstruation led to conflict and accusations between religious groups in Persia—this is the “red fence” of your title. Almost in a sense it sounds a bit like blood libel, but with menstrual blood. And you refer to this text in The Life of George, a text set in the 6th or 7th centuries CE during the reign of Khusro II.[22]  There's a wonderfully evocative story of a sister and brother who converted from Zoroastrianism to Christianity. When the sister’s slaves did not believe her faith confession, she then takes the fire of the God of the Magi while she is on her period, and runs around laughing and trampling it with her feet.Now, obviously there's a polemical framing to this text. But can you explain for us how women's bodies became this site of religious contestation and social conflict in the Sasanian Empire? 

  Shai: This is sort of one of the points that really inspired this whole book and research project, which is the way in which menstrual impurity becomes connected to questions of identity. My main research interests, you know since graduate school, was on interreligious kind of connections and conflict in Sasanian worlds. And initially when I was searching for a research topic for dissertation, I wasn't necessarily looking for something like the topic of menstruation. It doesn't seem like it would really be related to inter-religious friction, as much as perhaps friction in terms of gender. And yet I actually found that perhaps specifically because it already is built on a kind of gender binary, that this is something that applies to women in these systems, like in the Jewish and Zoroastrian system. That on top of that right or the way you described it, sort of using women's bodies, it's a way of talking about identity. 

  One of the ways that it happens is perhaps because in the Jewish system at least, there's a sort of gendered problem of identity. So Shaye Cohen, a professor at Harvard, wrote an interesting, provocative book called Why are Jewish Women Not Circumcised?[23] I think that's the topic. It's a playful, provocative topic. The book talks about this problem where in Judaism this main identity marker, at least so it seems, is male circumcision. So how could that be, that the most important identity marker actually only applies to 50% of the religious community? 

  So perhaps menstruation functions for women as a space of asserting religious identity. Jewish women were not circumcised, but they did have this thing that was related somehow to their gender. And perhaps that was one of the ways in which they built identity out of this realm of ritual. That of course doesn't really apply to the other communities, so it wouldn't apply to Zoroastrianism, certainly not Christianity, where there's no male circumcision to be able to kind of have this counterspace of religious identity. 

  But I think more broadly, in many religious traditions, and not only concerning menstrual impurity, women's bodies are highly marked from the male perspective. And because of that, they are spaces in which identity, religious identity, is asserted. 

  So this obviously is quite present and interesting, the topic of you know, religious modesty in various religious traditions. Veiling, covering of the hair, and this sort of thing becomes especially pronounced when it comes to women. And that pronouncement has to do with religious identity, right? So one covers their hair in a certain way as a woman. Right? And that is not just a way of being modest as a woman, but marking, let's say, a Jewish identity or a Islamic identity or that sort of thing. So I think that's another piece of it. 

  And it's not only limited to the religious communities that I explore in this region and time frame. Immediately after the time frame that I'm looking at, after the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the rise of Islam, it's fascinating to see how early traditions about Muhammad show Muhammad trying to forge a communal identity partially through using an approach to menstrual impurity. So the texts described how on the one hand, he is insistent that his community will not be overly-stringent like the Jews and the Zoroastrians. The Jews and the Zoroastrians are kind of the same camp. But at the same time, it's not going to be overly lax from his perspective, like some of the Christian communities that early Muslims were familiar with. We see that this, there’s sort of a continuity there, an interesting continuity there.

  And that story that you cited is one of the most colorful and dramatic ones, where the way that a woman asserts that she really has converted, and that's part of what's happening in that scene. These martyrologies, these Syriac martyrologies, the climax is at the moment when the conversion reallyhappens, and then the path towards martyrdom is paved. Right, how do you really convince people that you've converted? Maybe you could just take it back. Maybe you could just say, “Well, actually I still believe that the sun and the moon are powerful and in Ahuramazda, etcetera.” What she's doing there, what the story is depicting this woman is doing, is basically, she's burning the bridge. She is going and contaminating, from their perspective, the most sacred thing, fire, while she's impure. So it's fascinating that that's the way she sort of proves that she really is a Christian. 

  Emily: Doing an action from which there's no return. 

  Shai: Exactly. Exactly. 

  Emily: Where she couldn’t be accepted back.

  Shai: Yes, that's right. 

  Rebekah: So perhaps some of today's Jewish or Zoroastrian women might resonate with the menstruating women of ancient Mesopotamia, but a majority of our audiences probably do not have first hand experience with the world of menstrual restrictions. What was the legacy of these menstrual customs beyond late antiquity, or, what are some of the ways that the metaphor of the red fence might connect with contemporary experiences? 

  Shai: I'll try to combine both of them, which I can do by way of a review of my book actually [chuckles], written by a woman, a rabbinic figure, Leah Sarna.[24] And she described in this review how she has an observant Muslim friend, who similarly part of her identity as a Muslim woman is religious practices relating to menstruation, and how they would sort of trade notes. And it became an interesting site of like comparison and contrasting between their different religious traditions. In the review, she sort of wonders whether that is what I'm trying to describe, what's happening in late antiquity.  Which is possible. 

  But I think ultimately this remains a highly marked space, highly contested space, and that's why the fence metaphor was so important for me. So #1, the fence metaphor separates the gender. And the fence metaphor actually comes from a Talmudic story about menstrual practices. In this story, there's a rabbi named Rav Kahana who's confronted by a min. A min is a Hebrew word that refers to some person of a heretical sectarian, perhaps Christian in some texts but I argue not in this one, identity. And this minchallenges the rabbi. And says, “You claim that you are very pious, your community Is very pious, and you're careful not to have sex during menstruation. But come on!” The way he says it is, “Is it possible for fire to be near flax?” ( which is very combustible). You know, people have passions and desires and I don't really believe that your community is as pious as they present themselves to be. And the rabbi sort of has to respond. He actually uses the verse from Song of Songs which refers to this red fence, right, like “hedged with lilies” —or roses depending on how you translate shoshanna. That there is a fence, right, which is a very vulnerable fence, but separates the genders. At least that's how it seems to me. A metaphoric sense that this couple will not cross this fence, and therefore we really are as pious as we claim to be.

  But what I show in the book is that the metaphor of the fence isn't just about genders and the relationship between the genders. But it's also about the relationship between these different religious communities. And this is what the rabbi's doing there. He's saying, “We have the fence; you don't have the fence,” right? So that's one way of sort of a fence not making good neighbors. Like, “This is our thing and we don't want you, we don't want you present there.” 

  I think also in a sort of more abstract kind of meta way. I think just the fence is a metaphor of difference is useful in doing the kind of work I'm trying to do in late antiquity where I'm comparing texts. Particularly I'm comparing two different rabbinic communities, the rabbinic community in Babylonia and Palestine. And the differentiation between these texts sheds light on the menstrual practices that either the rabbis wanted to see or maybe actually did exist. 

  But the point I end with—and maybe this is a good point to end for this wonderful podcast—is that the fence also is something that we always feel as scholars when we're trying to really know what happened in late antiquity. And there is this desire, you know it's a productive desire, but a desire that like, “if I just get the philology right, if I just get the right reading, I can understand really what happened. I can get to those people. I can know what they were thinking and know what they were doing.” No, there is a fence that separates us from the past, from our ancestors, from antiquity. We can study as much as we can, but ultimately it's contingent. We only know as much as we know. And let's give these people their freedom to have lived their lives as they wanted to live them. 

  [podcast theme music interludes]

  Emily: Pliny wrote that there was “nothing more monstrous” than menstruation.[25] He probably wasn’t the first man disturbed by women’s quintessential bodily activity, and he certainly wasn’t the last. The day after Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly co-moderated the 2015 GOP presidential debate, then-candidate Donald Trump seemed to blame Kelly’s hard-hitting questions on her period, complaining,“you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”[26] Medical writers and religious intellectuals from Roman times to now recognized the connection between menstruation and procreation, but paradoxically, many also saw women’s blood as unsavory, dangerous, and sometimes evil.  

  Rebekah: Though menstruation is a natural bodily function for at least half of the world’s population, it is often shrouded in mystery. During their sex education classes, some Ethiopian school boys reportedly asked if period blood could make you sick. It had been a social taboo for so long, the boys innocently assumed menstruation was something dangerous or even wrong.[27] Anthropologist Emily Martin explored American cultural perception of menstruation as “failed reproduction,” which creates feelings of shame and secrecy around menstruation.[28] A completely normal bodily function gets turned into a taboo, and in creep feelings of shame or untowardness. Fathers feel embarrassed buying pads for their daughters, and PE teachers awkwardly accept “it’s that time of the month” as an excuse for sitting out sports. Women on their periods are stereotyped as peevish and even irrational, like Ms. Kelly seems to have been. 

  Emily: Through education, stigmatization is beginning to fall away. A 2016 study of more than a thousand Ugandan schoolgirls showed significant improvement in school attendance when they were given education about their bodily changes during puberty and supplied with sanitary pads or tampons.[29] Ethiopian teachers have incorporated menstruation education in the classroom—for girls but also for boys, helping them understand the prosaic reality of how women’s uteruses work and destigmatizing menstruation.[30] Around the world, the development of period cramp simulators has allowed those who don’t menstruate to empathize with some of the bodily experience. Destigmatization also comes in more pop-culture clothing. In the music video for Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood,” singer Hayley Williams plays a character The Crimson Curse, directly inspired by what she called the “brutal” experience of menstruation.[31] British comedians Cariad Lloyd and Jenny Bede then got in on the action in 2015, writing a parody of the song to protest the UK’s 5% tax on period products. Indirectly, one of the most recognized artists on the planet got people talking about periods. Growth is on the way. 

  Rebekah: In biblical, Zoroastrian, and rabbinic literature, blood sometimes symbolized cosmic struggles like conflicts between good and evil, between pollution and purity, or between men and women. But there are also more positive views of  menstrual blood as sacred or powerful.[32] Maybe that’s why Pliny, even as he called menstruation “monstrous,” also claimed that this blood held remarkable healing powers.  In bodily reality, blood is our life force—pulsating, nourishing, healing, animating. Menstruation is a sign of life. ‘Cause baby no one’s got bad blood.

  [podcast theme music plays over outro]

  Emily: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website, womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.

  This podcast is written, produced, and edited by us, Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun. The podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and theCommittee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University.

  Rebekah: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before! And don't forget:

  Both: Women were there!

  [Theme music plays to its conclusion]

  [1]Natalia Anthony, “Menstrual Taboos: Religious Practices That Violate Women’s Human Rights,” International Human Rights Law Review 9, no. 2 (October 24, 2020): 291–323, https://doi.org/10.1163/22131035-00902003.

  [2] Pandia Health Editorial Team and Sophia Yen, “The True Cost of Your Period,” Pandia Health, May 7, 2021, accessed August 7, 2024,  https://www.pandiahealth.com/blog/the-true-cost-of-your-period/; see also see also The Smithsonian’s history of feminine hygiene products: “Cosmetics and Personal Care Products in the Medicine and Science Collections: Feminine Hygiene Products,” The Smithsonian Institution, accessed August 7, 2024, https://www.si.edu/spotlight/health-hygiene-and-beauty/feminine-hygiene-products. 

  [3] “Feminine Hygiene Products Market Size, Share, Competitive Landscape and Trend Analysis Report, by Nature, Product Type and Distribution Channel : Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030,” Allied Market Research, 358 pages, January 2022, accessed August 7, 2024.  

  [4] Paul Montgomery, Caitlin R. Ryus, Catherine S. Dolan, Sue Dopson, and Linda M. Scott, “Sanitary pad interventions for girls' education in Ghana: a pilot study,” PloS one 7, no. 10 (2017): e48274, p. 4. Two years later, Ghana’s Ministry of Education chose to spend part of its loan from the World Bank on menstrual supplies for female students. Elisabeth Tofaris, “Can Better Sanitary Care Help Keep African Girls in School?” GPE Global Partnership for Education, April 18, 2018, accessed August 7, 2024. 

  [5] Pliny. Natural History, Volume VIII: Books 28-32. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 418. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

  [6] Besides these cures, Pliny reports that menstrual discharge or a menstruating woman can also heal gout, scrofula, tumors, abscesses, boils, and eye issues (HN 28.23.82).

  [7] As Elizabeth Shanks Alexander explained on the podcast last season, men, too, were made impure by their own genital discharges, and stayed impure until sundown. Lev 15:16-17; “Suffering Witches to Live: Jewish Women and the Legacies of Religious Law,” Women Who Went Before, Season 1 Episode 8, December 6, 2022, https://www.womenwhowentbefore.com/episodes/suffering-witches-to-live.

  [8] Jürgen K. Zangenberg,  “Pure Stone: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Purity Practices in Late Second Second Temple Judaism (Miqwa’ot and Stone Vessels),” in Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism, eds. Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan (Brill, 2013), 540–541. 

  [9] Shai Secunda examines rabbinic rulings on niddah within the Sasanian context in The Talmud's Red Fence: Menstrual Impurity and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

  [10] “[T]he rabbis employ the language of impurity as  an expression  describing the womans condition in which she is prohibited from having sexual relations.” Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of BIblical Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27.

  [11] Translation and discussion in Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 25–26.

  [12] Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 160–209.

  [13] For a summary of scholarship see Zangenberg, “Pure Stone,” 537–572. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv2gjwnr2.25. For the estimate of 600+ ritual baths, see Stefanie Hoss, Baths and Bathing: The culture of bathing and the baths and thermae in Palestine from the Hasmoneans to the Moslem conquest with an appendix on Jewish ritual Bbaths (miqva'ot), BAR International Series 1346(Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 4-5. Ronny Reich and Marcela Zapata Meza estimate around 800 mikvot have been discovered in Israel that date between the first century BCE and CE, “A Preliminary Report on the ‘Miqwaʾot’ of Migdal,” Israel Exploration Journal 64, no. 1 (2014), 63–71 (63). http://www.jstor.org/stable/44473982. For a survey of Jewish immersion pools in Judea, Galilee, and Peraea see Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 61-66.

  [14] Zangenberg, “Pure Stone,” 543–545.

  [15] On modern marriages in Israel and the laws of niddah, see Rotem Ben David Fix, “Vol. 41 Symposium Essay: Niddah - Jewish Menstruation and the Laws Governing Marriage in Israel,” Columbia Journal of Gender & Law Blog, April 7, 2021.

  [16] Khodādād Rezakhani, “Zoroastrianism,” Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, online 2018), np.

  [17] Christelle Jullien, “Mandaeans,” Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, online 2018), np.

  [18]The Wisdom of Solomon 7:1–2,trans. David Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 162.

  [19]Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram 34:30–1, trans. Secunda, The Talmud’s Red Fence, p. 44.

  [20] Arthur Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1979), 238.

  [21] See Mika Ahuvia and Sarit Kattan Gribetz, “ ‘The Daughters of Israel’: An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 1 (2018), 1–27.

  [22]History of Mar Jab-Alaha and Rabban Sauma, ed. Paul Bedjan (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), 448–449. On this work, see Gerrit  J.  Reinink, “Babai the Great’s Life of George and the Propagation of Doctrine in the Late Sasanian Empire,” in Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient, eds. Jan Willem Drijvers and John W. Watt (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 171–93. 

  [23] Shaye J. D. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcized? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  [24] Leah Sarna, “Persian Daughters of Israel,” Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2021, accessed March 3, 2025. https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/uncategorized/11602/persian-daughters-of-israel/.

  [25] Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.13.64. sed nihil facile reperiatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum. H. Rackham translates the line as “But nothing could easily be found that is more remarkable than the monthly flux of women.” (p. 549). Edition and translation: Pliny, Natural History, Volume II: Books 3-7, trans. H. Rackham, LCL 352 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942).

  [26] Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Trump: Debate Moderator Had ‘Blood Coming Out of Her Wherever’,” Time, August 7, 2015, accessed August 7, 2024. Trump later stated that he was not referring specifically to Kelly’s period but to blood emerging from somewhere else like the eyes or nose; but due to his prior history of misogynistic comments, many listeners immediately made the connection to menstruation. Laura Bennett, “What Trump Really Meant When He Said That Megyn Kelly Had ‘Blood Coming Out of Her Wherever’,” Slate, August 10, 2015, accessed August 7, 2024. 

  [27] Melody Schreiber, “Teaching girls (and boys) about menstruation takes moxie,” NPR, May 28, 2024, accessed August 7, 2024,

  https://www.npr.org/2024/05/28/g-s1-1310/menstruation-menstrual-education-periods-stigma.

  [28] Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).

  [29] Paul Montgomery, Julie Hennegan, Catherine Dolan, Maryalice Wu, Laurel Steinfield, and Linda Scott, “Menstruation and the Cycle of Poverty: A Cluster Quasi-Randomised Control Trial of Sanitary Pad and Puberty Education Provision in Uganda,” PLoS ONE 11, no. 12 (2016): 26 pages. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0166122; Tofaris, “Can Better Sanitary Care Help Keep African Girls in School?.”

  [30] Schreiber, “Teaching girls (and boys)”; Dawit Haile, “Providing sanitary pads in schools helps to increase class attendance of girls: The Impact of providing sanitary pads in school,” UNICEF, May 17, 2023, accessed August 7, 2024, https://www.unicef.org/ethiopia/stories/providing-sanitary-pads-schools-helps-increase-class-attendance-girls.

  [31] “Paramore’s Hayley Williams says menstrual cycles inspired her Taylor Swift video cameo,” NME, May 20, 2015, accessed August 7, 2024, https://www.nme.com/news/music/paramore-12-1216587.

  [32] Delfin A. Tan, Rohana Haththotuwa, and Ian S. Fraser, “Cultural aspects and mythologies surrounding menstruation and abnormal uterine bleeding,” Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol 40 (2017): 121–133. doi: 10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2016.09.015. Red blood is simultaneously a sign of sexuality and fertility, and a source of disgust and taboo. In Hindu mythology, the god Indra murdered a Brahmin and then divided his sin, giving part of it to women. Their menstrual blood is the god’s primordial sin. 

• Episode Sources

  • Ahuvia, Mika, and Sarit Kattan Gribetz. “‘The Daughters of Israel’: An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources.” Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 1 (2018): 1–27.

  • Anthony, Natalia. “Menstrual Taboos: Religious Practices That Violate Women’s Human Rights.” International Human Rights Law Review 9, no. 2 (October 24, 2020): 291–323.

  • Cohen, Shaye J. D. Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcized? Gender and Covenant in Judaism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

  • “Cosmetics and Personal Care Products in the Medicine and Science Collections: Feminine Hygiene Products.” The Smithsonian Institution. Online exhibition. Accessed August 7, 2024.

  • The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac. Edited and translated by Arthur Vööbus. Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1979.

  • “Feminine Hygiene Products Market Size, Share, Competitive Landscape and Trend Analysis Report, by Nature, Product Type and Distribution Channel : Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030.” Allied Market Research. 358 pages. January 2022. Accessed August 7, 2024.  

  • Fix, Rotem Ben David. “Vol. 41 Symposium Essay: Niddah - Jewish Menstruation and the Laws Governing Marriage in Israel.” Columbia Journal of Gender & Law Blog, April 7, 2021.

  • Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

  • Haile, Dawit. “Providing sanitary pads in schools helps to increase class attendance of girls: The Impact of providing sanitary pads in school.” UNICEF. May 17, 2023. Accessed August 7, 2024. 

  • History of Mar Jab-Alaha and Rabban Sauma. Edited by Paul Bedjan. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007.

  • Hoss, Stefanie. Baths and Bathing: The Culture of bathing and the baths and thermae in Palestine from the Hasmoneans to the Moslem conquest with an appendix on Jewish ritual Bbaths (miqva'ot). BAR International Series 1346. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005.

  • Jullien, Christelle. “Mandaeans.” Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, online 2018.

  • Levine, Amy-Jill. “Discharging Responsibility: Matthean Jesus, Biblical Law, and Hemorrhaging Woman.” Pp. 70–87 in A Feminist Companion to Matthew. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine. Bloomsbury, 2001.

  • Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

  • Montgomery, Paul, Julie Hennegan, Catherine Dolan, Maryalice Wu, Laurel Steinfield, and Linda Scott. “Menstruation and the Cycle of Poverty: A Cluster Quasi-Randomised Control Trial of Sanitary Pad and Puberty Education Provision in Uganda.” PLoS ONE 11, no. 12 (2016): 26 pages.

  • Montgomery, Paul, Caitlin R. Ryus, Catherine S. Dolan, Sue Dopson, and Linda M. Scott. “Sanitary pad interventions for girls' education in Ghana: a pilot study.” PloS one 7, no. 10 (2017): e48274. 

  • Pandia Health Editorial Team and Sophia Yen. “The True Cost of Your Period.” Pandia Health. May 7, 2021. Accessed August 7, 2024.

  • “Paramore’s Hayley Williams says menstrual cycles inspired her Taylor Swift video cameo.” NME. May 20, 2015. Accessed August 7, 2024. 

  • Pliny. Natural History, Volume II: Books 3-7. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 352. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942.

  • ———. Natural History, Volume VIII: Books 28-32. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 418. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

  • Reich, Ronny, and Marcela Zapata Meza. “A Preliminary Report on the ‘Miqwaʾot’ of Migdal,” Israel Exploration Journal 64, no. 1 (2014): 63–71. 

  • Reinink, Gerrit J. “Babai the Great’s Life of George and the Propagation of Doctrine in the Late Sasanian Empire.” Pp. 171–193 in Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient. Edited by Jan Willem Drijvers and John W. Watt. Leiden: Brill, 1999. 

  • Rezakhani, Khodādād. “Zoroastrianism.” In Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, online 2018.

  • Sarna, Leah. “Persian Daughters of Israel.” Jewish Review of Books. Fall 2021. Accessed March 3, 2025.

  • Schreiber, Melody. “Teaching girls (and boys) about menstruation takes moxie.” NPR. May 28, 2024. Accessed August 7, 2024.

  • Secunda, Shai. The Talmud's Red Fence: Menstrual Impurity and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

  • Tan, Delfin A., Rohana Haththotuwa, and Ian S. Fraser. “Cultural aspects and mythologies surrounding menstruation and abnormal uterine bleeding.” Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol40 (2017): 121–133. 

  • Tofaris, Elizabeth. “Can Better Sanitary Care Help Keep African Girls in School?.” GPE Global Partnership for Education. April 18, 2018. Accessed August 7, 2024.

  • Wassen, Cecilia. “Jesus and the Hemorrhaging Woman In Mark 5:24–34: Insights From Purity Laws From The Dead Sea Scrolls.” Pp. 641–666 in Scripture in Transition: Essays on Septuagint, Hebrew Bible, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of Raija Sollamo. Edited by Anssi Voitila and Jutta Jokiranta. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

  • Winston, David. The Wisdom of Solomon: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979.

  • Zangenberg, Jürgen K. “Pure Stone: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Purity Practices in Late Second Temple Judaism (Miqwa’ot and Stone Vessels).” Pp. 537–572 in Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism. Edited by Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Cover Image:

The New Testament Gospels tell the story of a woman who suffered with an issue of blood for twelve years before Jesus healed her (Mark 5 and Luke 8). Traditionally interpreters believed the woman’s issue of blood had left her in a state of ritual impurity, limiting her social and religious life. More recently scholars have questioned that reading. They have suggested that the woman was ill, but not necessarily prohibited from society.

Image Credit: The Woman with the Flow of Blood. Fresco from the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter. Rome. 4th century CE. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. The music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.

Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University

Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.