The logic of such exclusions is simple, yet foreign to our modern clinical minds. Sexual intercourse, emission of sexual fluids, uterine discharges, and menstruation were not considered unclean out of prudishness. Rather, the concept was that the body had lost the fluids that contain, create, and sustain life.3 That which is not whole and is associated with loss of life cannot enter Yahweh’s presence until ritual restoration rectified that status. The same reasoning is behind the ritually unclean status of those with physical handicaps, infected with a disease, and who have touched a corpse,
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