NOTES for Lev 12:1-8

The mention of a woman's impurity after childbirth may trouble us. There is no sin in this; on the contrary, by helping to bring forth new life, she seems to take part in an act of creation together with the Creator of the world... Yet in the Bible we will more than once encounter such expressions as "born in sin," "conceived in iniquity," and so on (see, for example, Psalm 50). People seem always to have understood that birth, even though it fulfills God's commandment, is not entirely free from sin. The person who comes into the world bears the same mark of imperfection, fear, loneliness, incompleteness—in short, sinfulness—as all of us. Nevertheless, the idea of karma as a kind of evil fate that inevitably hangs over a person from the day of birth is alien to biblical revelation. Already in the ordinances of Leviticus we read that every child is consecrated to God (with the appropriate sacrifice), and therefore potentially shares in sanctification and liberation from every evil.