Advent 1 - What Women Know

Isaiah 64:6

The lections give us Isaiah 64:1-9 for Advent 1, so I’ve been thinking about ways I’ve heard people exegete Isaiah’s metaphor about menstrual cloths over the years. 64:6 is often presented as a pejorative, as though Isaiah intended to shock. I think, however, this assumption reveals a hidden contempt.

The metaphor comes in the midst of a discussion of sin. The NIV has it: “We have become like one who is unclean; all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.”

I’ve heard preachers pause for a beat and then drop the line: “So in the original language…” going on to discomfit modern listeners by bringing menstruation into the pulpit.

This week there was a Twitter discussion regarding whether it was acceptable for pastors to use profanity and foul-mouthed slurs for rhetorical purposes. The usual tortured hermeneutical applications showed up—the prophets, the vipers, Paul. And then someone reached for this example: “Your righteousness is like a used tampon.”

But is menstruation a dirty word, the hygienic necessities of a woman’s reproductive cycle somehow profane? And was it Isaiah’s intent to shock?

After all, ceremonial uncleanliness was a matter of everyday life—menstruation, nocturnal emissions, contact with dead bodies, strange rashes, mold—many things made a person unclean. I imagine that the relatively public process of purification, as well as the close living quarters, home births, and tending of livestock, made a shyness about bodily functions unlikely.

In short, I don’t think Isaiah, a married prophet with children, was somehow especially grossed out by the idea of menstruation or that he used this metaphor because he thought it the filthiest things possible or the most shocking terminology. (I’ve often heard this metaphor graphically described in such terms, laced with contempt for women). So why use this specific phrase?

The NIV and the NLT translate 64:6 as “filthy rags.” NASB opts for “filthy garment and NRSV for “filthy cloth.” The ESV and CSB have “polluted garment.” As is so often the case, the phrase itself is sparse. The NET adds the helpful translator’s note to spotlight this: “and like a garment of menstruation [are] all our righteous acts.” Garment. Menstruation.

The element of “filthiness” is arguably our preferred translation nuance when rendering this phrase into English. The text is matter-of-fact, no hint that there is something especially dirty or, as suggested in the QT Twitter comment, foul-mouthed and profane about menstruation.

Certainly the metaphor includes ritual uncleanliness, the preceding phrase makes that clear. Blood is also a prominent factor in what makes things clean or unclean, and a woman needed purification after her cycle ended. Also, I think, there is something pointed about the visual imagery of blood-stained fabric. A culture reliant on handwashing garments would have known how difficult it is to get blood out of handwoven cloth.

But why not some other kind of blood or emission? Why menstruation specifically for this metaphor? Any tampon ad serves as a reminder that our culture often portrays a woman’s period as a messy inconvenience, but it is foremost a regular reminder of a woman’s reproductive cycle. I suspect this would have been the primary way it would have registered for Isaiah’s listeners, especially in a society that consistently spoke of conception as God “opening the womb.”

Might Isaiah’s metaphor have a layered meaning?

Yes, ritual defilement points to our state of uncleanliness, our need for external intervention to wash us.

But with fertility in mind, might it also be a word picture for the disappointing failure to bring forth life?

The way our righteous acts, our best efforts, cannot save?

Our capacity for life was shattered by the fall, ushering in death, and leaving us waiting for a visitation that can rescue and bring life. So too does the biblical vocabulary name conception—God opening the womb—as outside of human control.

I don’t know how the women of Isaiah’s day viewed menstruation, but I do know how women hoping to conceive sometimes see those first spots of blood.

With heartbreak and grief and disappointment. Frustration and longing and powerlessness.

The Lonely Tree, by: Leo Gestel

I am wondering if this metaphor is not about the filthy degree of the sinful human heart (or of menstruation itself). I don’t think Isaiah’s point was to remind humanity how foul they are. Sometimes uncleanliness was not due to a willful sin or error but an indication of the persistent reality of the human condition cut off and detached from a holy God. Perhaps, in that sense, the imagery brings to mind the deeply interwoven, painful, frustrating, disappointing, barren, impossible-to-humanly-resurrect reality of sin’s pervasive stain.

In the end, whether Isaiah intended a layered meaning or simply wanted a visceral word picture for the defilement of blood, I don’t think it came with contempt for humanity nor for women and the bodily functions God gave them.

It is we who bring that to the text, we who insist that tampons and menstruation are in the same category of profanity.

What a strange take when all of us enter the world through women’s bodies, when the God who designed the womb was Himself carried in one. Because when God, as Isaiah foretold, “rent the heavens and came down,” He did so amidst the cries of a laboring woman and into a world riven with sin and longing and pain and waiting. “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like a menstrual garment.”

But, here, next to the manger, the red streaked linen wasn’t a reminder of barrenness but of holy visitation. I wonder what kind of cloth Mary used to wipe the unclean blood and fluid and vernix off His little body before swaddling the One who came to make all things clean.