1. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

2. See, for instance, Baker, Cynthia M., Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 57Google Scholar: “Sexual intimacy and purity go hand in hand (or hand in ‘house’) with regulation and control”; Halberstam, Chaya, Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 38–39Google Scholar; Rosen-Zvi, Ishay, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender and Midrash (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “The female body became the object of a new discipline, involving intricate knowledge of a sophisticated anatomy, with the sages as its exclusive experts”; Münz-Manor, Ophir, Migdar ve-miniyut be-tarbut ḥazal (Raanana: The Open University of Israel Press, 2017), 54Google Scholar: “The development of the science of stains given to the rabbis’ control transforms the female body [and its emissions] such that it is both practically and symbolically imprisoned in the hands of the rabbis”; see also 56–59; Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott, “Footnotes to Carnal Israel: Infertility and the Legal Subject,” in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, ed. Fonrobert, Charlotte et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 164Google Scholar: “Approaching [a rabbi to ask a question regarding menstrual purity] presumes the law as an arena of rabbinic expertise and the rabbi as a legal authority.”

3. See Greenawalt, Kent, Law and Objectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Friedman, Lawrence M., The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975)Google Scholar.

4. Ishay Rosen-Zvi hinted at this desideratum in a 2003 review of Fonrobert's book, but did not pursue the comparison I offer below. See Rosen-Zvi, Ishay, “Blood, Identity and Counterdiscourse: Rabbinic Writings on Menstruation,” Prooftexts 23, no. 2 (2003): 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Indeed, Leviticus 15 discusses male and female impurities in the same chapter, drawing many parallels between the two with respect to objects that contract their impurity, the days needed before purification, and the purification sacrifice and ritual. See particularly the coda to the chapter in Leviticus 15:32–33, which explicitly relates the different forms of impurity. It thus seems natural that the rabbis would have thought about these institutions in parallel.

6. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 68–73.

7. On the legal significance of reading bodily signs, see Halberstam, Law and Truth, 17–41.

8. As Jacob Milgrom observes, “being a disease of the private parts, only the person can determine if he or she has a flow” and therefore “the rules of genital discharge must be taught to the Israelites, who are responsible for their own diagnosis.” See Milgrom, Jacob, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 906Google Scholar.

9. See M. Niddah 1:7, 2:1, 8:1–4, 9:1–5; M. Mikva'ot 8:2.

10. See Balberg, Mira, Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 157–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. The story has been extensively discussed by, among others, Hauptman, Judith, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman's Voice (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 153–56Google Scholar; Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 112–15; Halberstam, Law and Truth, 34–41; Hayes, Christine, What's Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 218–22Google Scholar.

12. Christine Hayes, What's Divine, 222, discusses this passage in the context of the debate about rabbinic nominalism, and highlights how R. Akiva's authority is built precisely on the factual unlikelihood of his presumption. As she puts it, “It is not simply that his presumption is factually unsupported; it is in all likelihood contrary to fact.”

13. Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis, 153–56, reads this story as emphasizing R. Akiva's wish to rule leniently for the benefit of the woman, which she views to be his general approach. The incredulousness of the disciples, however, underscores not the leniency of R. Akiva's ruling, but rather the malleability of the law in the hands of the expert interpreter. In this case the far-reaching interpretation advances a leniency, but it also highlights that the law could equally well be interpreted toward stringency.

14. This motif of surprise at the rabbi's ruling is found in additional stories concerning R. Akiva. See below regarding M. Zavim 2:2. An additional narrative regarding R. Akiva is related in M. Bava Kamma 8:6, where a man credulously interrogates R. Akiva's ruling that he must recompense a woman he embarrassed. There, too, the story ends with R. Akiva overruling the man's query and getting the last word.

15. Chaya Halberstam, Law and Truth, 36–37, astutely points out that R. Akiva's distinction between blood and stain is a legal fiction that is well underscored by the fact that the Mishnah itself uses the terms interchangeably.

16. See Simon-Shoshan, Moshe, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

17. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 113–14.

18. In the midrash parallel to this mishnah, found in the Sifra (Meẓora‘ Zavim 4:3), the idea that “many bloods are impure” is derived from the use of the phrase “her bloods” (Leviticus 12:7; 20:18).

19. A similar process occurs with the impurity of skin lesions, where the Mishnah creates a taxonomy of four shades of white rendering a skin lesion impure (M. Nega‘im 1:1–2). See Balberg, Mira, “Rabbinic Authority, Medical Rhetoric, and Body Hermeneutics in Mishnah Nega‘im,” AJS Review 35, no. 2 (2011): 323–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The four different shades of white rendering a skin lesion impure are based on the biblical precedent that describes a similar kind of color code (Leviticus 13:19, 24, 42, 43, 49). In contrast, the biblical text does not define the color, consistency, or quantity of a genital flux emission, yet the rabbis nonetheless enumerate them just as they do the laws of skin lesions. By doing so, the rabbis appropriated the role of the biblical priest in a subtle way, using the priestly model of skin examination as the basis for their construction of the way to determine genital flux impurities.

20. Nonetheless, tannaitic literature does not depict rabbis as actually engaging in physical inspection of menstrual blood samples. In the later talmudic discussion, by contrast, such examinations are described as performed by rabbinic experts. See Shai Secunda, “Dashtana—Ki Derekh Nashim Li: A Study of the Babylonian Rabbinic Laws of Menstruation in Relation to Corresponding Zoroastrian Texts” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 2007), 61–130.

21. MS Vatican 113.

22. On Shmuel's status vis-à-vis the Mishnah, see Epstein, Jacob N., Mavoʾ le-nosaḥ ha-mishnah, 3^rd ed. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000), 211–34, esp. 215–16Google Scholar.

23. See Friedman, Shamma, “Mavoʾ ‘al derekh ḥeker ha-sugya,” in Meḥkarim u-mekorot, ed. Dimitrovsky, H. Z. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1977), 301–8Google Scholar.

24. Fonrobert discusses the concept of sensation as a counterdiscourse to the treatment of women's bodies as architectural constructs likened to inanimate objects. However, seeing as the discussion of sensation is appended to the mishnaic treatment of bloodstains, in this article I build on Fonrobert's idea of a counterdiscourse, but view it as juxtaposed to the science of blood and stains that Fonrobert analyzes in a separate section of her book.

25. See Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

26. Dean-Jones, Lesley, Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994)Google Scholar; Dean-Jones, , “The ‘Proof’ of Anatomy,” in Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, ed. Fantham, Elaine et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 183–205Google Scholar.

27. See Flemming, Rebecca, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 196–215Google Scholar; King, Helen, Hippocrates’ Women: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–40Google Scholar.

28. See Levinson, Joshua, “Cultural Androgyny in Rabbinic Literature,” in From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature, ed. Kottek, Samuel et al. (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000), 124–25Google Scholar.

29. Hence, the semen of men who had coitus too often dissolved into blood. See Laqueur, Making Sex, 35–43; Dean-Jones, Women's Bodies, 60–61.

30. See Levinson, “Cultural Androgyny” for a fuller discussion and comparison.

31. The Sifra similarly distinguishes between male and female emissions based on the different prepositions used in very similar verses. On the verse “When any man has a discharge [zav] from his body, he is impure” (Leviticus 15:2), the Sifra offers the following interpretation: “‘From his body’—[he becomes impure] only when his impurity exits his body.” In contrast, the verse “When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood in her body, she shall remain in her impurity for seven days” (Leviticus 15:19), merits the following interpretation: “‘In her body’—this teaches that she becomes/renders others impure [when the blood is] inside just as [when it is released] outside. R. Shimon says let it suffice for her to be like the one who has intercourse with her: just as the one who has intercourse with her is not impure inside as he is outside, so too she is not impure inside as outside.” The anonymous opinion in the Sifra focuses on the minute difference between the prepositions “from his body” and “in her body” and presents it as reflecting a significant difference between the two kinds of impurity. The man's genital organs are located outside his body; thus, his emission is necessarily outside, or “from,” his body. In contrast, the woman's genital organs are located both inside and outside her body; therefore, it is more difficult to determine the precise chronological point at which the flow of blood begins. When the blood leaves her body, it conceivably has been flowing within her for some time. The Sifra's distinction introduces the innovative idea that a woman becomes impure while the blood is still in her body. This law is entirely unique against the backdrop of the tannaitic laws of impurity. As Vered Noam has demonstrated, as a rule, impurity contained within the body—for instance, a dead fetus or an impure ring—cannot be conveyed, even to the person holding the source of the impurity within his or her body. See Noam, Vered, Mi-Qumran la-mahapekhah ha-tanna'it: Hebetim bi-tefisat ha-tum'ah (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2010), 271–73Google Scholar. The Sifra passage, however, states clearly and explicitly that menstrual blood renders the woman impure even when it is still contained within the woman's body. Fonrobert emphasizes the deliberateness of the first opinion in the Sifra in hinging such a far-reaching reading on the small linguistic difference between the two verses (Menstrual Purity, 49). She argues that precisely this emphasis on the difference between the two verses highlights the hypothetical possibility of equation that the Sifra wishes to dismiss. We should note, however, that the opinion of R. Shimon does draw an analogy between male and female emissions. R. Shimon argues that just as a man's emission does not cause impurity until it exits his body, so too a woman's emission should not cause impurity until it exits her body. Thus, already in the Sifra we can identify two alternative models—one that attempts to equate female and male emissions and another that distinguishes sharply between the two.

32. MS Vatican 113.

33. B. Niddah 43a. M. Mikva'ot rules that a man who arose and found his flesh warm is impure, but only the Bavli reads into this text an assumption about sensation of the kind described above.

34. See Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 85–102; Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, “Radical Subjectivity: Law and Self-Knowledge in the Babylonian Talmud” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014), 123–27.

35. Rashi, B. Niddah 58a, s.v. ’amar R. Ashi.

36. A similar proposal has been presented by Cohen, Adiel, “Din hargashah—ʿiyyun meḥudash,” Netuʿim 10 (2003): 41–47Google Scholar.

37. A similar taxonomy of shades of white is recorded regarding skin afflictions in M. Nega‘im 1:1.

38. See Balberg, Purity, Body and Self, 161, for the same conclusion.

39. Most scholars have interpreted this story as radically limiting the laws of the zav to the point of their extinction. See, for instance, Baumgarten, Joseph, “Zab Impurity in Qumran and in Rabbinic Law,” Journal of Jewish Studies 45 (1994): 273–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Furstenberg, Yair, “Zav,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, ed. Klauck, Hans-Josef et al. , vol. 9 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 1199–1204Google Scholar. Yet, it must be noted that R. Akiva's view is presented as a minority view that causes uproar among his contemporaries.

40. On R. Akiva as initiating leniencies, see Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis, 153–56, and see my discussion above.

41. The depiction of R. Akiva in this text and in the one from M. Niddah is thematized in a series of later Babylonian narratives that depict him engaged in far-reaching textual exegesis resulting in his audience's incredulity and incomprehension. See B. Menaḥot 29b; B. Menaḥot 89a; B. Niddah 72b. On these passages, see Hayes, Christine, “Rabbinic Contestations of Authority,” Cardozo Law Review 28 (2006): 123–41, in particular 130–32Google Scholar.

42. The theme of R. Akiva's insistence on expert knowledge with regard to bodily signs continues in T. Nega‘im, where R. Akiva's son Yehoshua is said to question R. Akiva regarding the need for a taxonomy of colors of skin afflictions, to which R. Akiva responds that such a taxonomy is needed “to teach you that if one is not an expert [baki] in them and their names, he should not inspect skin afflictions” (T. Nega‘im 1:1). On this passage, see Balberg, “Medical Rhetoric,” 331–32.

43. Boyarin, Daniel, “A Tale of Two Synods: Nicaea, Yavneh and Rabbinic Ecclesiology,” Exemplaria 12 (2000): 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Another illustration of this claim may be found with respect to rabbinic examination of skin afflictions. M. Nega‘im 2:4 describes the poses in which men and women are examined to determine the nature of their skin afflictions. As Miriam Peskowitz has observed, men and women are described in postures taken from gender-specific labors: men in the pose of hoeing and harvesting olives, in contrast to women in a pose of kneading, nursing a child, or weaving. See Peskowitz, Miriam, Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 84–85Google Scholar. Yet the goal and procedure of the inspection (nakedness and inspection of private parts) are identical for both men and women, indicating that for the rabbis, alongside the practical aim of determining impurity, stood another purpose of positioning themselves as the expert interpreters of the body, whether male or female. Moreover, as Steven Fraade has shown, already in the Second Temple period, the authority to inspect skin afflictions was bound up with contestations of expertise and knowledge; thus it is reasonable to view Mishnah Nega‘im as continuous with these concerns. See Fraade, Steven D., “Shifting from Priestly to Non-Priestly Legal Authority: A Comparison of the Damascus Document and the Midrash Sifra,” Dead Sea Discoveries 6, no. 2 (1999): 109–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. See Jackson, Ralph, Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 32–43Google Scholar; Perkins, Judith, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 1995), 142–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. See Tielman, Teun, “Galen on Medicine as a Science and as an Art,” History of Medicine 2, no. 2 (2015): 132–40Google Scholar.

47. Barton, Tamsyn S., Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 133–68Google Scholar.

48. For a parallel reading of the laws of Nega‘im in the context of Galenic medicine and rhetoric, see Balberg, “Medical Rhetoric.”

49. Mattern, Susan P., Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 69–91Google Scholar.

50. For a detailed analysis of this tendency in the laws of skin affliction, see Balberg, “Medical Rhetoric.”

51. Zav impurity was no longer followed after the destruction of the Temple. In his dissertation, Yaacov Sussmann argued that tractate Zavim, along with the rest of the order of Toharot, was not studied in the Babylonian academies owing to its legal irrelevance. See Yaacov Sussmann, “Sugiyot bavliyot li-sedarim zera‘im ve-tohorot” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1969).

52. Y. Niddah 2:3 (50a); B. Niddah 19a–20a. For a comprehensive discussion, see Secunda, “Dashtana,” 61–130.

53. Secunda, “Dashtana,” 78.

54. Y. Niddah 2:7 (50a); B. Niddah 20a.

55. The Bavli completes its discussion of the precise nature of each of the colors in the mishnaic list by citing the testimony of four sages, each comparing his knowledge to that of earlier sages and concluding that his own skill is insufficient to adjudicate bloodstains.

56. Although the two Talmuds share many traditions in elaborating the mishnaic “blood science,” there is also an important difference between them. The Yerushalmi emphasizes the difficulty of blood science in order to caution rabbis that they must study the skills needed to rule on bloodstains from a senior expert in this field, whereas the Bavli stresses that blood science is so difficult that it cannot be conducted by junior sages. As Secunda notes in “Dashtana,” 115, only the Bavli “actively discourages the examination of bloodstains on account of its difficulty.”

57. The Bavli relates two stories about rabbinic sages who distinguish between menstrual and other types of blood not with their vision, but rather by their sense of smell. As Secunda notes, “Dashtana,” 118–19, “these two tales reinforce the Babylonian notion that rabbinic ‘blood science’ is beyond the ability of ‘regular’ rabbis, and is instead limited to heroic sages who can almost miraculously discern between different substances against great odds. The ability to accurately issue these rulings is deemed almost divine, and called ‘the secret of the Lord,’ or is perceived as emanating from the ‘chambers of the heart.’”

58. See Hezser, Catherine, “Roman Law and Legal Composition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva and Jaffee, Martin S. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Ibid., 146.

60. See Moscovitz, Leib, Talmudic Reasoning: From Casuistics to Conceptualization (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002)Google Scholar.

61. See Rubenstein, Jeffrey L., The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 16–38Google Scholar.

62. Libson, Ayelet Hoffmann, Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.