10 - Gender Fluidity and the Danger of Leaky Manhood

Summary

The intensity of attention to the sexual domain within the defilement discourse of the HB raises important questions that have yet to be addressed. It is straightforward to understand, on the one hand, how sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were perceived as contagious and threatening, and on the other hand to understand why sexual transgressions were believed to produce a stain of culpability that carried the threat of divine retribution. What remains to be explained is the following: why were ordinary sexual emissions, specifically semen, menstruation and birth lochia, regarded as defiling when other bodily emissions were not? In particular, according to the largely compelling view that pollution relates to disgust, one would expect excrement to be defiling, yet surprisingly one finds that P does not mention it as a source of impurity. Intriguingly, even the law of the war camp in Deuteronomy 23:10–15 (discussed below), which explicitly requires the distancing of impurity (specifically seminal emission) and excrement, treats these topics independently and does not ascribe pollution to the latter.