Healing of the woman with the bleeding disorder

The woman has been subject to bleeding for twelve years, has suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors, has spent all she had, and instead of getting better has grown worse. Luke, who was a physician, records the same twelve years and omits the criticism of the doctors.

Her condition had a legal dimension that made it worse than an illness. A woman with a discharge of blood was ritually unclean for as long as it continued, and so was anything she sat or lay on, and anyone who touched her or those things became unclean until evening. Twelve years of that means twelve years without entering the temple, without ordinary social contact and very probably without a marriage. She is not simply ill; she has been excluded from the community for over a decade.

That explains why she comes up behind him in the crowd rather than asking. If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed. She is trying to take something without being noticed, because being noticed has consequences, and because by touching him in a crowd she is making everyone she brushes past unclean too.

She touches his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stops and she feels in her body that she is freed from her suffering.

Then the part she was trying to avoid. He turns round in the crowd and asks who touched his clothes. The disciples point out the obvious, that people are pressing in on all sides, and he keeps looking around to see who had done it.

She comes and falls at his feet, trembling with fear, and tells him the whole truth. In front of a crowd that includes a synagogue leader, she has to explain what she had and why she did it.

What she is given is not only the healing. Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering. That word daughter is the only time he is recorded addressing anyone that way, and what she is being given, in public, is her place back.

The delay it causes is the reason Jairus's daughter dies before they arrive. A father whose child is dying has to stand in the road while an unclean woman is publicly reinstated, and then hear that it is too late.

Twelve years of bleeding meant twelve years of ritual uncleanness under the purity laws, which affected everything she touched and everyone who touched her, and it would have made marriage and ordinary household life impossible. Mark adds that she had spent all she had on doctors and had grown worse rather than better, and the prescriptions preserved in later rabbinic literature for this condition are elaborate, expensive and useless.

Approaching him through a crowd meant making everyone she brushed against unclean, which is why she comes from behind and says nothing. What she gets is not anonymity. He stops, and insists on finding her, and she comes trembling and tells the whole truth in front of everybody. Then, daughter, which is the only time he addresses a woman that way.