1. Margulies, Mordecai, Midrash Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, 3rd ed. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1993), 2:311Google Scholar, to line 2.

2. In a recent article, I demonstrate that a survey of classical rabbinic texts shows that they marginalize the birthing mother in one of three ways. She is either absent altogether, a mere receptacle for the fetus, or the passive subject of rabbinic discourse. Schick, Shana Strauch, “Depictions of Childbirth in Rabbinic Literature: The Innovation of a Geniza Midrashic Text,” in Motherhood in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, ed. Lehman, Marjorie, Kanarek, Jane L., and Bronner, Simon J., Jewish Cultural Studies 5 (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017), 285–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Goldberg, Abraham, “The Term Gufah in Midrash Leviticus Rabbah” [in Hebrew], Leshonenu 38 (1973–4): 163–9Google Scholar; Visotzky, Burton, “The Misnomers ‘Petihah’ and ‘Homiletic Midrash’ as Description for Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta De-Rav Kahana,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18 (2011): 19–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mandel, Paul, “ʿAl ‘pataḥ’ ve-ʿal ha-petiḥah: ʿIyyun ḥadash,” in Higayon L’Yona: New Aspects in the Study of Midrash, Aggadah and Piyyut: In Honor of Professor Yona Fraenkel, ed. Levinson, Joshua, Elbaum, Jacob, and Hasan-Rokem, Galit (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2006), 49–82Google Scholar.

4. See parallel, Genesis Rabbah 8:1. See Margulies's introduction, pp. xii–xiii.

5. Babylonian sages do not generally appear in Leviticus Rabbah. See Margulies, introduction to Va-yikraʾ Rabbah.

6. Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, Tazriaʿ, par. 14, to Leviticus 12:2 (ed. Margulies, 2:301). Other Palestinian works containing similar depictions include Bereshit Rabbah, Bereshit, par. 17, to Genesis 2:21 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 1:159); Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, par. Be-shalakh, mas. de-Shira 8 (ed. Horotvitz-Rabin, 144) הקדוש ברוך הוא … נותן לאדם בן מטפה של מים ודומה לצורת אביו; Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon b. Yoḥai, par. Be-shalakh 15:11 (ed. Epstein-Melamed, 94), אבל מי שאמר והיה העולם אינו כן אלא נותן לאדם זה בן מטיפה של מים דומה לצורתו של אביו.

7. Even where the fetus is nourished from the mother's body, the fetus threatens the mother's life (14:8).

8. This likely echoes Greco-Roman sources that compare the womb to an oven, but there it is in order that the seed be incubated and not a threat to its life, as LR describes. Kessler, Gwynn, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 95Google Scholar.

9. See T. Niddah 2:1; Y. Niddah 1:5 (49c); Y. Sotah 4:4 (19d); B. Niddah 60a. This was a widely held view in Greco-Roman thought, evidenced in Hippocratic texts, Alim. 37 ix.110.16–18, Aristotle, , Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, A. L. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1943), 777a8Google Scholar; and Soranus, , Gynaecology 1.15, trans. Temkin, O. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 14Google Scholar. This was also maintained by Galen and Herophilus. Kottek, Samuel, “Breastfeeding in Ancient Jewish Sources, Historical and Legal Aspects,” in Human Milk: Its Biological and Social Value, ed. Freier, S. and Eidelman, A. I. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1980), 8Google Scholar.

10. Visotzky, Burton L., Golden Bells and Pomegranates: Studies in Midrash Leviticus Rabbah (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 167Google Scholar, understands this passage as a polemic against the Christian doctrines of original sin and immaculate conception.

11. Va-yikraʾ Rabbah (ed. Margulies, 2:311), l. 2. This is absent in the Vilna edition of Leviticus Rabbah, but was transcribed by Margulies based on MSS Oxford 147, 2335, Vatican 32, Munich 117, and Geniza manuscripts, following the order of the latter.

12. Kessler, Conceiving Israel, 174 n. 85.

13. This might be implied in its later parallel Tanḥuma (Buber) Tazriaʿ 4; Warsaw, ibid., 3, which, after citing R. Isaac's dictum, states: “R. Ḥiyya b. Abba said: Therefore, a male is dependent [nitleh] on the mother, a female on the father.” R. Ḥiyya seems to imply that the previous dictums ascribe gender to the parent of the opposite sex who emits seed first; Scripture therefore pedigreed males through their mother and females through their father. Also see the later midrashic anthology Midrash Ha-gadol (ed. Margulies, 311) for a similar tradition. Support for this interpretation is found in Sifre Zuta on Numbers 27:1 (ed. Horowitz, 317) (cf. parallel in Yalkut Shimoni Numbers 773), where nitlah refers to whom one's genealogy is ascribed. See also ibid., 6:23, p. 247, and a parallel in Yalkut Shimoni Numbers 710. However, the parable that follows this statement comparing the process to “two people who entered a bathhouse; the one who sweats first leaves first,” seems to indicate that it is referring to something biological. Indeed, Tamar Jacobowitz, “Leviticus Rabbah and the Spiritualization of the Laws of Impurity” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010), 110, notes the wordplay of תזריע, “emits seed,” and מזיע, “sweats.”

14. Consistent with Leviticus Rabbah 14, the Aramaic Palestinian targumim explain ʾishah ki- tazriaʿ as “when a woman becomes pregnant.” On the meaning of this phrase, see Levine, Baruch A., The JPS Torah Commentary: Leviticus (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 73Google Scholar. He suggests that this might be an idiomatic phrase connoting childbirth. Biblical terms such as va-tahar va-teled, “she became pregnant and gave birth” (Genesis 4:1 and Leviticus 12:2) similarly convey women's active role in pregnancy and birth. Kessler, Conceiving Israel, 113.

15. Or a “two-seed theory,” discussed below. van der Horst, Pieter Willem, “Sarah's Seminal Emission: Hebrews 11:11 in the Light of Ancient Embryology,” Hellenism-Judaism-Christianity: Essays on their Interaction (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1994), 217–8Google Scholar.

16. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 716a, 729b, 737a 5.

17. Jacobowitz, “Leviticus Rabbah,” chap. 1; Kessler, Conceiving Israel.

18. See Kottek, Samuel, “Embryology in Talmudic and Midrashic Literature,” Journal of the History of Biology 14 (1981): 299–315CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Kottek, , “Talmudic and Greco-Roman Data on Pregnancy,” in From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature, ed. Kottek, Samuel and Horstmanshoff, Manfred (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000)Google Scholar; Newmyer, Stephen, “Talmudic Medicine and Greek Sources,” Korot (1985): 9:34–57Google ScholarPubMed; Urbach, Ephraim, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Abrahams, Israel (1975; repr. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1979)Google Scholar; van der Horst, “Sarah's Seminal Emission,” 203–23, which discuss the Greco-Roman underpinnings of rabbinic texts concerning embryology and birth.

19. Soranus, Gynaecology 1.12.

20. Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard, Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 88–94Google Scholar; Dean-Jones, Lesley, Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 149Google Scholar. Galen, On Semen 2.2, 2.4, ed. and trans. Phillip de Lacy (Berlin: Akademic, 1992), 50; Galen, , On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. May, Margaret Tallmadge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Publications on the History of Science, 1968), 2:630Google Scholar.

21. A century after Hesiod, Semonides of Amorgos (seventh century BCE) deemed women “the worst plague Zeus has made.” Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (London: Duckworth, 1975)Google Scholar; Archer, M., “Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude toward Women,” Arethusa 6 (1973): 75–90Google Scholar. Studies that address this issue include Frymer-Kensky, Tikva Simone, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992), chap. 19Google Scholar; Dinnerstein, Dorothy, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976)Google Scholar; Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1975)Google Scholar; Cantarella, Eve, Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans. Fant, Maureen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Zeitlin, Froma, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” Arethusa 11 (1978): 149–84Google Scholar.

22. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 205; Boyarin, Daniel, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84Google Scholar; Frazer, R. M., The Poems of Hesiod (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 99Google Scholar; Sissa, Giulia, Greek Virginity, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

23. Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, Tazriaʿ, par. 14, to Leviticus 12:2 (ed. Margulies, 2:302).

24. Jacobowitz, “Leviticus Rabbah,” 63–4.

25. I, Aeschylus, Oresteia: Eumenides, trans. Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 158 ll. 658–66Google Scholar; Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 204. Leviticus Rabbah 14:5 also incriminates both parents for being too interested in sex to consider the needs of the developing child. God rather acts as father, placing the semen in the mother's womb.

26. In Greek mythology Apollo generates Athena without a mother. Agricultural imagery is also found in the writings of Augustine and Clement. See Kessler, Conceiving Israel, 119–20.

27. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 98; Balberg, Mira, “The Animalistic Gullet and the Godlike Soul: Reframing Sacrifice in Midrash Leviticus Rabbah,” AJS Review 38, no. 2 (2014): 221–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Visotzky, Golden Bells, 29, 48–58.

28. For example, following M. Sotah 1:7, the Yerushalmi cites an aggadic tradition interpreting Exodus 2:2 that erases the role of Miriam, while the parallel Bavli sugya cites that tradition along with others that emphasize and celebrate her role (B. Sotah 12a–b). See Shana Strauch Schick, “Behind Every Great Prophet Is a Woman: The Depictions of Miriam in Masechet Sotah and Their Cultural Contexts” (forthcoming). Similarly, while the figure of Beruriah is suppressed in the Mishnah, the Bavli both revives her persona and creates narratives concerning her biography. See Goodblatt, David, “The Beruriah Traditions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (1975): 68–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ilan, Tal, “Beruriah Has Spoken Well: The Historical Beruriah and Her Transformation in the Rabbinic Corpora,” in Integrating Women into Second Temple History (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1999), 175–94Google Scholar; Schick, Shana Strauch, “A Reexamination of the Bavli's Beruriah Narratives in Light of Middle Persian Literature” [in Hebrew], Zion 79 (2014): 409–24Google Scholar.

29. Levinson, Joshua, The Twice Told Tale: A Poetics of the Exegetical Narrative in Rabbinic Midrash (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005), 265Google Scholar; Bailey, James L., “Josephus’ Portrayal of the Matriarchs,” in Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, ed. Feldman, Louis and Hata, Gohei (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 154–79Google Scholar.

30. The material discussed here includes Sumerian works from the Neo-Sumerian period (22^nd to 21^st century BCE) to the Old Babylonian, or Classical period (2004–1600 BCE).

31. Sumerian mythology, like Leviticus Rabbah, depicts male gods conceiving without mothers, e.g. the Myth of Enki and Ninhursag (in Jacobsen, Thorkild, The Harps That Once: Sumerian Poetry in Translation [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987], 181–234Google Scholar, 155–66); Kramer, S. N. and Maier, John, Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 341–7Google Scholar; Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 18. The figure of Enki usurped many roles previously belonging to mother goddesses. See Heimpel, W., “The Nanše Hymn,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 33 (1891): 65–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacobsen, Harps, 125–42.

32. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 48–49; Stol, Marten and Wiggermann, F. A. M., Birth in Babylonia and the Bible: Its Mediterranean Setting (Groningen: Styx, 2000), 83–84Google Scholar.

33. Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 79. Nisaba is mainly associated with wisdom, being the patron of learning and writing. Hallo, William, “The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry,” Recontre assyriologique international 17 (1969): l. 13Google Scholar; Vanstiphout, H. L. J., “Lipit-Eshtar's Praise in the Edubba,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 30 (1978): 33–61 l. 18fCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 39–40.

34. Reconstructed in Civil, Miguel, “Enlil and Ninlil: The Marriage of Sud,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103, no. 1 (1983): 60 l. 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, Tazriaʿ, par. 14, to Leviticus 12:2 (ed. Margulies, 2:316–17).

36. Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 75. Goddesses are also associated with holding captives in prison, perhaps reminiscent of R. Levi's metaphor in LR 14:3 of the womb as prison. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, chap. 4.

37. Jacobsen, Thorkild, “Notes on Nintur,” Orientalia 42 (1973): 287Google Scholar. Psalm 139:15 similarly refers to the womb as seter, “in secret.”

38. Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 10 n. 62.; Foster, Benjamin R., Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, 3rd ed. (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2005), 172Google Scholar.

39. Following translation, Robert Bigg's, “An Archaic Sumerian Version of the Kesh Temple Hymn from Tell Abu Salabikh,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 61 (1971): 195–6Google Scholar.

40. Biggs, “Kesh Temple Hymn,” 202 l. 78; Jacobsen, “Notes,” 288 (also found in the Myth of the Creation of the Hoe).

41. Jacobsen, “Notes,” 288

42. Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, Tazriaʿ, par. 14, to Leviticus 12:2 (ed. Margulies, 2:302).

43. Ibid., 2:301–2.

44. The extended rabbinic metaphor of woman's body as a house, which recurs in LR 14, has been discussed in detail by Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 48–60Google Scholar; Baker, Cynthia M., Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 34–76Google Scholar. The agricultural metaphor for the woman's body discussed above is also common in Babylonian texts. See Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 1.

45. Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, Tazriaʿ, par. 14, to Leviticus 12:2 (ed. Margulies, 2:306–7).

46. Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 65. Sumerian women's role was so inextricably bound with storage that the Sumerian word ama means both “storehouse” and the women's quarter of a house. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 34.

47. See Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 71 n. 142, for references to other Babylonian passages employing the “bolts and locks” imagery. Both texts also compare birth to flowing water, though this is understandable considering the presence of water at birth.

48. Lambert, W. G., “A Middle Assyrian Medical Text,” Iraq 31 (1969): 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. It also shares affinities to LR 14:2 in describing the fetus as one bound in a prison-like state.

50. Asalluḫi promises the help of a woman, who is likely the mother goddess. Stol and Wiggermann, Birth in Babylonia and the Bible, 11.

51. Ibid., 10–11, using reconstructed text from van Dijk, J., “Une Incantation accompagnant le naissance de l'homme,” Orientalia 42 (1973): 503Google Scholar; Foster, Before the Muses, 171–72.

52. Foster, Before the Muses, 1006; Lambert, “A Middle Assyrian Medical Text,” pl. VI, p. 32, ll. 33–6; 52–3. This tablet includes sixty-two lines of mostly well-preserved script, the first half prescribing treatment for pregnant women suffering from colic, lines 33–62 containing two incantations for women in childbirth, originating from a different source. Another architectural metaphor found in an incantation for easing childbirth is tur, or “birth-hut in the cow pen,” which serves as a metaphorical stand-in for the womb. See Jacobsen, “Notes,” 279–80. Jacobsen remarks that “birth-hut” was eventually appropriated into Sumerian as the word for “womb,” šag-tùr.

53. Marc Van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 196, posits the coherent rationality and logic governing ancient Babylonian texts of varying genres, particularly in cuneiform writing. The failure of humankind to provide stability led to a greater belief in gods as controlling all aspects of the universe, as evidenced in divinatory/omen texts.

54. During the later Sargonic (Akkadian 2500–2200 BCE) and Ur III (2100–2000 BCE) periods, kings identified themselves as gods, and in the latter period they claimed to be spouses of Inanna/Ishtar. Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 60–61.

55. Jacobsen, “Notes,” 287.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Kramer, Samuel N. and Bernhardt, Inez, “Enki und die Weltordnung,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universitiit Jena 9 (1959/60): 238 l. 400Google Scholar; Jacobsen, “Notes,” 294.

59. Kessler, Conceiving Israel, 6–8.

60. Parpola, Simo, “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52, no. 3 (1993): 161–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar (and Jerrold Cooper's review in Journal of the American Oriental Society 120, no. 3 [2000]: 430–44); Gruber, Mayer, “Matrilineal Determination of Jewishness: Biblical and Near Eastern Roots,” in Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom, ed. Wright, David P., Freedman, David Noel, and Hurvitz, Avi (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 437–43Google Scholar.; Elman, Yaakov, “Babylonian Echoes in a Late Rabbinic Legend,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies 4 (1972): 13–19Google Scholar, and his bibliography in note 1. Elman also pointed out to me via email communication (June 11, 2015) that the memory of Babylonian origin of month names remains in the Yerushalmi (Y. Rosh Ha-shana 1:2 [56b]). The Jewish calendar, made up of lunar months, resembles the Babylonian calendar. Parker, Richard and Dubberstein, Waldo, Babylonian Chronology 626 BC–AD 75 (1956; repr. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Geller, Markham, “The Influence of Ancient Mesopotamia on Hellenistic Judaism,” Civilizations of the Ancient Near East 1 (1995): 43–54Google Scholar; Geller, “An Akkadian Vademecum in the Babylonian Talmud,” in Kottek and Horstmanshoff, From Athens to Jerusalem, 13–32; Ronis, Sara, “A Demonic Servant in Rav Papa's Household: Demons as Subjects in the Mesopotamian Talmud,” in The Aggada of the Babylonian Talmud and Its Cultural World, ed. Herman, Geoffrey and Rubenstein, Jeffrey (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018)Google Scholar, and see her article in this volume. Yochanan Muffs notes (with regard to legal texts) that “cultural and societal norms—and especially legal institutions—rarely die in the Near East.” Muffs, Yochanan, Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 12–13Google Scholar.

61. Aspects of the Greek goddess Aphrodite derive from the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. See Burkert, Walter, “Die Griechen und der Orient von Homer bis zu den Magiern,” Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Bachvarova, Mary, From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Nicholas Gill, “Hepatoscopy: Liver Consultation in Babylonia, Greece, and Etruria” (BA thesis, Queen's University, 2014).

63. Penglase, Charles, Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2 n. 1, for a lengthy bibliography; Burkert, Walter, “Prehistory of Presocratic Philosophy in an Orientalizing Context,” The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, ed. Cohen, M. E. and Graham, D. W. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 55–85Google Scholar. Van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks, 207–14, describes parallels between Babylonian omen lists and a sixth-century Greek text from Ephesus.

64. Eileithyia is depicted as “goddess of the pains of birth.” “Orphic Hymn 2, to Prothyraeia,” in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1914), ll. 115–19. The Iliad describes “the sharp pangs which the Eilithyia, goddesses of childbirth, daughters of Juno and dispensers of cruel pain, send upon a woman when she is in labor.” Homer, The Iliad, ed. Julie Nord (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 125. Artemis “supports children being born.” Scholium to Pindar Ol. 3.54a, in Jensen, Minna Skafte, “Artemis in Homer,” From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast, ed. Fischer-Hansen, Tobias and Poulsen, Birte (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), 64Google Scholar.

Zoroastrian literature likewise references goddesses who assist in birth (Yašt. 5.3 = Yašt 65.2). Jenny Rose, “Children I: Childbirth in Zoroastrianism,” Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 4, pp. 403–4, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/children-i. However, the Avestan hymn stresses her role as easing labor pain and references the need to purify the womb. These themes are echoed in the Vīdēvdād 21 in a formula requesting pure conception, easy birth, and good children.

65. Genesis 21:1, 25:21, 29:31, 30:22; 1 Samuel 1:5, 6, 19; and Psalms 127:3 deem the conception of a child as the work of God; Isaiah 44:2, 44:24, 49:5, 66:9; Jeremiah 1:5, 20:14–18; Psalms 139:13–16; Job 3:1–3, 10:8–11, and 31:15 depict God as forming the fetus in the womb and bringing it forth at birth. However, none of these verses provide the specific and intimate details included in LR 14. See Trible, Phyllis, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 34–56Google Scholar, who demonstrates how God's involvement with the wombs of women throughout the biblical canon serves as a metaphor for God's compassion.

66. Biale, David, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 37Google Scholar, makes a similar claim regarding rabbinic views on sexuality: “The Bible played a central role in the evolution of rabbinic Judaism, but it often furnished no more than proof texts for the rabbis’ own original constructions; rabbinic speculations on sexuality were a complex hybrid of reinterpreted biblical concepts and Hellenistic ideas.”

67. Phillips, J. A., Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1984), 5Google Scholar.

68. Hallo, William, “Early Mesopotamian Title,” American Oriental Society 43 (1957): 134–35Google Scholar; Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses, 75.

69. On aggadic clusters devoted to one topic see Friedman, Shamma, “Historical Aggadah in the Talmud” [in Hebrew], in Saul Lieberman Memorial Volume, ed. Friedman, Shamma (Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1993), 120Google Scholar; Weiss, Avraham, ʿAl ha-yeẓirah ha-sifrutit shel ha-ʾamoraim (New York: Ḥorev, 1962), 194–281Google Scholar.

70. On the use of Leviticus Rabbah in the Bavli, see Margulies's introduction to Va-yikraʾ Rabbah, xxxi.

71. Following MS Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica, Ebr. 113. MS Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica, Ebr. 110–11 attributes this tradition to R. Ishmael, perhaps a result of scribal error, since R. Ishmael's name appears in the previous sentence. T. Niddah 4:10 records a different account of the embryo by Abba Shaul, reported in B. Niddah 25a.

72. It is a matter of debate whether this minor tractate predates or postdates the Bavli. While Zlotnich, D., The Tractate “Mourning” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar and Meyers, E. M., “The Use of Archeology in Understanding Rabbinic Materials,” in Texts and Responses, ed. Fishbane, Michael and Mendes-Flohr, Paul (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 28–42Google Scholar, date it to the end of the third century, Strack, Hermann and Stemberger, Gunter, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 229Google Scholar, maintain an eighth-century composition. Kraemer, David, The Meaning of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (London: Routledge, 2000), 9Google Scholar, dates it to the later geonic period.

73. Although this tradition has been viewed by modern scholarship as the dominant rabbinic position regarding gender selection (Kottek, “Embryology,” 305), Kessler notes this is anomalous (Conceiving Israel, 79, 173 n. 83).

74. See also B. Niddah 25b, 70b–71a; B. Bava Kamma 92a; B. Berakhot 54a, and 60a where R. Isaac's dictum challenges a baraita that links gender selection with prayer and hence an act of God. A similar assumption underlies B. Ḥullin 69a regarding animals.

75. I have noted a similar phenomenon in other sugyot, where the Bavli arranges material from Palestinian texts into a chiastic structure and places the Palestinian opinion at the center. See Schick, Shana Strauch, “Negligence and Strict Liability in Babylonia and Palestine: Two Competing Systems of Tort Law in the Rulings of Early Amoraim,” Diné Israel 29 (2012): 161–62Google Scholar.

76. Chiastic structure is a literary feature found in many ancient and classical texts, which often highlights the central points. It is found in both biblical and rabbinic texts. For rabbinic texts, see Cohen, Norman J., “Structural Analysis of a Talmudic Story: Joseph-Who-Honors-the–Sabbath,” Jewish Quarterly Review 72 (1982): 161–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frankel, Jonah, Darkhe ha-ʾaggadah ve-ha-midrash (Jerusalem: Masada, 1991), 23–269Google Scholar, 307; Steinmetz, Devorah, “Must the Patriarch Know ‘Uqtzin? The Nasi as Scholar in Babylonian Aggada,” AJS Review 23, no. 2 (1998): 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. This is one of several amoraic debates that are scattered throughout the aggadic cluster, which is a common phenomenon. See Rosenthal, David, “Bene ha-talmud hifsiku ve-kafzu le-hakshot be-tokh ha-baraitaʾ,” Tarbiz 60 (1991): 560–63Google Scholar.

78. The phrase also appears in B. Ḥagigah 12a with regard to both Adam's height, as well as the light of Creation given to Adam, thus combining both its use in LR 14 and B. Niddah 31a; Bereshit Rabbah (Vilna) 12:6; Shemot Rabbah (Vilna) 35:1.

79. MS Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Heb. 671 attributes this statement to R. Isaac in the name of R. Ami, both Babylonian sages who immigrated to Israel. They appear together in both talmuds. This is likewise how the attribution appears in B. Niddah 31b. Satlow, Michael, Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995), 304Google Scholar, prefers this reading and concludes that the view maintaining that if the woman emits seed first a male child will be born is attributed only to Palestinian sages. Joshua Levinson, “Cultural Androgyny in Rabbinic Literature,” in Kottek and Horstmanshoff, From Athens to Jerusalem, 124 n. 32, counters that R. Isaac b. R. Ami is the preferred version. I have followed Levinson. Irrespective of which version is correct, the view that the mother emits seed appears only in the Bavli. A similar statement is cited in B. Niddah 71a in the name of R. Ḥama b. R. Ḥaninah, a Palestinian sage.

80. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, 716a, 729b, 737a 5. See Naḥmanides's biblical commentary to Leviticus 12:2, which interprets it and the Bavli's three-partner tradition in light of Aristotelian theory. LR 14:9's reference to menstrual blood might also reflect Aristotle. The Aristotelian theory also seems to lie at the heart of several Bavli sugyot. See Tirzah Meachem, “Women Are Not Susceptible to Arousal” [in Hebrew], in To Be a Jewish Woman, vol. 6, ed. Tova Cohen (Jerusalem: Kolekh, 2013), 153–68; Shana Strauch Schick, “Do Women Emit Seed? Theories of Embryogenesis and the Regulation of Female Masturbation in Rabbinic Literature,” Female Bodies, Female Practitioners: Proceedings from the 2014 Conference in Berlin (forthcoming).

81. Its later parallel in Kohelet Rabbah 5:10 reads “Tanni.”

82. See Higger, M., ʾOẓar ha-baraitot (New York: Shulsinger, 1942–43)Google Scholar, 5:57 n. 8; 6:448; Reuven Kiperwasser, “‘Three Partners in a Person’: The Genesis and Development of Embryological Theory in Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism,” lectio difficilior (February 2009), accessed November 14, 2016, http://www.lectio.unibe.ch/09_2/kiperwasser.html. Kiperwasser also points out that the parallel Yerushalmi version is not attributed to Tannaim and that this tradition was therefore taken from its original context regarding the respect due to parents and God (B. Kiddushin 30b) and placed into a new one pertaining to fetal formation.

83. See Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person,” n. 15.

84. There are several other differences that Kiperwasser discusses in detail. Ibid., 12–15.

85. Levinson, “Cultural Androgyny,” 124 n. 32.

86. For a late parallel, see Kohelet Rabbah 5:10 and Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person” for a discussion of this tradition.

87. In recent years, scholarship championed by Yaakov Elman has demonstrated many affinities, shared institutions, and theologies common to the Babylonian Talmud and Middle Persian texts. See Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) for a bibliography along with an introduction to the field of Talmudo-Iranica.

88. All citations from the Bundahišn are from the Middle Persian Dictionary Project, English translation by Domenico Agostini, accessed February 19, 2016, http://mpdp.mpdict.com. Reuven Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person,” has explored the Bavli's three-partners tradition and its espousal of a two-seed theory, and has also concluded that it likely reflects the Bundahišn. Since he has discussed it in detail, I provided a short citation of one particularly relevant passage from the Bundahišn, which, like the Bavli, attributes sex determination to male versus female seed.

89. See Susruta-Samhita, ed. and trans. Priya Vrat Sharma (Varanasi: Chaukhambha Visvabharati, 2001), vol. 2, part 2, Sarirasthana (section on human body): 3 (On the descent of the embryo), for another appearance of this tradition; Sohn, Peter, Die Medizin des Zādsparam: Anatomie, Physiologie und Psychologie in den Wizīdagīhā ī Zādsparam, einer zoroastrisch-mittelpersisch Anthologie aus dem frühislamischen Iran des neunten Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 16–17Google Scholar, in his section on embryogenesis, which is based on the medical treatise of Zādspram; Gignoux, Ph. and Tafazzoli, A., Anthologie de Zādspram, Studia Iranica 13 (Paris: Association pour l'Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 1993)Google Scholar. Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person,” 29–30, also discusses other Bundahišn passages that describe what each parent contributes in a similar manner to the Bavli.

90. The Avesta was transmitted orally for almost two millennia and was only written down after Zoroastrian priests created an alphabet in the mid-sixth century. H. Bailey postulates that this was the result of Manichaean influence. Bailey, H. W., Zoroastrian Problems in the Ninth-Century Books (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 159–76Google Scholar; Elman, Yaakov, “Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Fonrobert, Charlotte and Jaffee, Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167Google Scholar. See Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person,” n. 59, for an extensive bibliography.

91. Kiperwasser, Reuven and Shapira, Dan D. Y., “Irano-Talmudica I: The Three-Legged Ass and Ridya in B. Taanith—Some Observations about Mythic Hydrology in the Babylonian Talmud and in Ancient Iran,” AJS Review 32, no. 1 (2008): 101–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92. It also bears mentioning the many parallels between the laws of menstruation that appear in the Bavli with Middle Persian literature. Shai Secunda, “Dashtana—‘Ki Derekh Nashim Li’: A Study of the Babylonian Rabbinic Laws of Menstruation in Relation to Corresponding Zoroastrian Texts” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 2008). This constitutes another parallel development regarding the female body between the two bodies of law.

93. This was due to the influx of Nestorian refugees from Edessa in the Byzantine Empire in 431, which included many physicians. By the sixth century, Sasanian medical knowledge was thoroughly Hellenized. Bellamy, David and Pfister, Andrea, World Medicine: Plants, Patients, and People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 90Google Scholar.

94. See Kiperwasser, “Three Partners in a Person,” for a discussion on seed theories and gender politics.

This is not to say that women are engendered in a positive light in Zoroastrian texts. Bundahišn 14A.1 explicitly states that women's procreative ability was begrudgingly bestowed from Ohrmazd, who found no other way of allowing procreation “except woman whose adversary is the race of whores.”

95. B. Niddah 30b. Perhaps relatedly, when this cluster is quoted in the twelfth-century anthology, Midrash Aggadah (Buber), Va-yikraʾ, Tazriaʿ 12:2, this second half is not included, indicating that it may have been regarded as a separate unit by the editor of that collection, or was unknown to him.

96. There are many elements of the R. Simlai tradition that are beyond the scope of the present study. Several studies discuss its affinities with the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis in stressing the idealized depiction of prenatal knowledge. Jellinek, Adolph, Introduction to the Bet Ha-Midrash, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Bamberger and Wahrmann, 1938), 27Google Scholar; Urbach, The Sages, 246–8, also cites Yitzhak Baer. More recently see David Flatto, “The Angel's Oath: The Relationship of Hazal to the Platonic Doctrine of Recollection,” accessed September 6, 2017, http://text.rcarabbis.org/the-angel%E2%80%99s-oath-the-relationship-of-hazal-to-the-platonic-doctrine-of-recollection/.

97. See The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dēnkard, ed. Madan, D. M. (Bombay: Society for the Promotion of Researches into the Zoroastrian Religion, 1911), book 3, chap. 420, 405Google Scholar. Literally “upholders of the original faith,” pōryōtkēšān refers to the original Zoroastrian lawmakers and later priests. Shaked, Shaul, The Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages: Dēnkard VI (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979), 225Google Scholar.

98. The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran, companion vol. 1 to A History of Persian Literature, ed. Ronald Emmerick, Maria Macuch, and Ehsan Yarshater (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 135. Some date the Spand Nask, from which Dēnkard VII draws, to the Achaemenid period. See Stausberg, M., Vevaina, Y. Sohrab-Dinshaw, eds., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (1966; repr. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 456CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99. Many scholars assume a second- or third-century dating based on the discovery of the third-century papyrus Zervos, Bodmer V. George, “The Protevangelium of James and the Composition of the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex: Chronology, Theology, and Liturgy,” in “Noncanonical” Religious Texts in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. McDonald, Lee Martin and Charlesworth, James (London: T. & T. Clark, 2012), 178–80Google Scholar; Eykel, Eric M. Vanden, “But Their Faces Were All Looking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 18–24Google Scholar; Barnard, L. W., “The Origins and Emergence of the Church in Edessa during the First Two Centuries A.D.,” Vigiliae Christianae 22 (1968): 161–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On its Syrian origins, see Elliott, J. K., The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zervos, George, “An Early Non-Canonical Annunciation Story,” in Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, ed. Lovering, E. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 687–88Google Scholar; Vuong, Lily, Gender and Purity in the Protoevangelium of James (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2013), 6–9Google Scholar, 40–44, has recently argued that its concern for extreme purity, depictions of Jewish practice, and tension between ascetic versus family life are indicative of a second-/third-century Syrian provenance.

100. Vuong, Gender and Purity, 16.

101. Ibid., 187–91. As such, while the text centers on Mary, it is only in as much as she is the mother of Jesus. Peter Schäfer and Michael Rosenberg have demonstrated the likelihood of Babylonian rabbinic awareness of Syriac Christian ideas and that Bavli passages respond in turn, and have identified a handful of texts that polemicize against Marian devotion and others that adapt Mariological ideas, reflecting an increase in Marian devotion. Schäfer, Peter, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 15–22Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Michael, “Sexual Serpents and Perpetual Virginity: Marian Rejectionism in the Babylonian Talmud,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106 (2016): 465–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenberg, , “Penetrating Words: A Babylonian Rabbinic Response to Syriac Mariology,” Journal of Jewish Studies 67 (2016): 121–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boyarin, Daniel, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

102. This phenomenon comports with a more general trend I have found across several Bavli (mainly aggadic) texts that reinstate female agency where earlier Palestinian parallels remove it. I have found this in traditions concerning the role of Miriam in the rescue of Moses, along with aggadot detailing the life of Beruriah. See discussion above.