The impact of Leviticus 12,1-8 on representations of women's anthropology

The Book of Leviticus occupies a very special place in Hebrew Bible because it's aim is to regulate the life of Jews in their community in order to assure the connection with the Holy and with God (J. Milgrom, 2004). The Leviticus laws also have an important impact on the anthropology and vision of the sexuality in the Jewish life (Poorthuis, Schwartz, 2000). We will analyze Leviticus 12,1-8, laws which regulate women's afterbirth impurity, from a socio-anthropological perspective (Herbert, De Troyer, Johnson, Korte, 2008). We will try to analyze the impact of this passage on the vision of woman's anthropology in Chris-tianity (Knödel, 1995) and how Leviticus 12,1-8 is understood and observed by Chris-tian traditions today. We think that it can be interesting to examine whether or not Lv 12,1-8 influences (in positive or negative way) the understanding of women's anthro-pology in Christianity. We propose to study the question in concern in Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox traditions from the viewpoint of feminist biblical interpretation (Tarja Philipp, 2006), historical (Poorthuis, Schwartz, 2000) and socio-anthropological (Herbert, De Troyer, Johnson, Korte, 2008) perspectives. In the first part of the report, we will analyze the historical and narrative context of Lv 12,1-8 from biblical perspective (Milgrom, 2004). Then we will present how Roman Catholic (Herbert, De Troyer, Johnson, Korte, 2008) and Russian Orthodox (Beliakova, Emchenko, 2011) traditions understand Lv 12,1-8 historically up to nowadays. Finally, we'll discuss what impact Lv 12,1-8 has on women's anthropology in Roman Catholic (Roll, 1995; Dressen, 2003) and in Russian Orthodox (Farley, 2012; Guillaume, 1997) traditions today. We will also consider whether Lv 12,1-8 helps to perceive more positively women's anthropology via feminist liturgy (Enzner-Probst, 2004).