Was a man who lay with a menstruating woman unclean for seven days, or cut off from his people?

The two laws deal with different cases, and their wording shows it. Leviticus 15 is a chapter about bodily discharges and the ritual uncleanness they bring, whether anyone is at fault or not. Verse 24 covers a man on whom “her flowers”, her flow, comes while he is with her. The natural case is a period that begins unexpectedly. He has not knowingly broken any command, so he is simply unclean for seven days, as she is (15:19). Keil and Delitzsch read the verse this way, and Gill, following Ibn Ezra, says it speaks of a man who acted ‘not presumptuously but ignorantly’.

Leviticus 18:19 and 20:18 belong to a different list: sexual acts that God forbade outright, alongside adultery and incest. Leviticus 20:18 describes a man who knowingly has relations with a woman during her period, with her consent: “he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood”. That is a deliberate act by both, against a known command (18:19), and for it the penalty is to be ‘cut off’ from the people. Gill takes this as death, by the judges if the case was established, or else by the hand of God, or perhaps as dying childless. The law treats an impurity incurred by accident differently from a forbidden act done on purpose, as most systems of law distinguish accident from intent.

Bleeding after childbirth

Keil and Delitzsch think Leviticus 20:18 also covers intercourse during the bleeding after childbirth, since its Hebrew phrase for ‘the fountain of her blood’ (meqor dameha) is used of a mother after childbirth in 12:7.

What exactly being ‘cut off’ meant is debated: death at the hands of the judges, an early death sent by God, the loss of one’s descendants, or exclusion from the people. Christians also differ on whether the rule in Leviticus 18:19 still binds them: some count it among the moral laws of that chapter, and others among the purity laws that do not apply under the new covenant.