'I am Impure'/'I am Forbidden:' Purity and Prohibition as Distinct Formal Categories in the Laws of Niddah

This dissertation uses the menstrual laws (laws of "niddah") in the Bible and Rabbinic literature as a lens for thinking about the relationship between the legal categories of impurity and prohibition. The menstrual laws, it is argued, are a particularly fruitful topic of inquiry because of their appearance both in the first half of Leviticus (Lev 12 and 15), in the context of concerns of ritual impurity, and in the second half of Leviticus (Lev 18:19 and 20:18), in the context of the Holiness Code legislation, in which the legal rhetoric is one of prohibition rather than impurity.;It is argued that a careful analysis of both the content of Rabbinic rulings regarding the laws of niddah as well as the language used to express these rulings reveals a change over time in Rabbinic thinking. Whereas Tannaitic and early Amoraic Rabbis rarely if ever express awareness of a hard-and-fast formal distinction between categories of impurity-law and of law-framed-as-prohibition, later Babylonian Amoraic Rabbis as well as anonymous editors make use, explicitly and implicitly, of these formal categories. At the same time, however, the content of Rabbinic rulings is not necessarily constrained by awareness or lack of awareness of such a clear conceptual distinction.;Chapter One considers the situation in the Pentateuch and argues that the Bible has two different models of the relationship between impurity-law and prohibition-based-law vis-a-vis niddah. Lev 15 and Lev 20:18, when read together, treat impurity and prohibition as separate categories of law; that is to say, Lev 15 makes no mention of prohibition and Lev 20:18 makes no mention of impurity. Lev 18:19, however, conflates the two categories, defining a prohibition using purity-terminology. These two different approaches are both found in Rabbinic literature about niddah. In Chapter Two, we treat Rabbinic rulings about immersion and show that while Tannaitic and early Amoraic Rabbis express no explicit awareness of a clear divide between impurity and prohibition-related consequences of immersion, late Babylonia editing of earlier sources reveals both an awareness of such a divide as well as anxiety about it. Chapter Three considers the topic of internal inspections performed to determine a woman's menstrual state. Here we see that although Tannaitic and early Amoraic Rabbis once again share a common discourse, insofar as they do not generally distinguish between impurity law and prohibition-based law, while late Amoraic Rabbis and anonymous editors use a discourse in which purity and prohibition are clearly demarcated as separate legal categories, the actual rulings of Tannaitic Rabbis in fact have more in common with the rulings of late Amoraic Rabbis and anonymous editors than with early Amoraic Rabbis. Finally, Chapter Four considers the topic of hymenal blood and argues that we have here a case of precisely those Rabbis most aware of conceptual distinctions between impurity and transgression conflating the two in order to achieve particular legal ends.