NOTES for Lev 12:1-8

We may be troubled by the mention of a woman's impurity after childbirth. There is no sin in this; on the contrary, by helping new life appear, she in a sense participates in the creative act together with the Creator of the world... Yet more than once in the Bible we will meet similar expressions: "born in sins," "conceived in iniquities," and so on (see, for example, Psalm 50). It seems that people have always found it obvious that birth, even as the fulfillment of God's commandment, is not absolutely free from sin, since the person who comes into the world bears the same mark of imperfection, fear, loneliness, incompleteness - in short, the same sinfulness as all of us.

And yet the idea of karma as some evil fate that invariably hangs over a person from the day of birth is deeply foreign to biblical revelation. Already in the Levitical statute we read that every child is dedicated to God (through the offering of the appropriate sacrifice), that is, potentially shares in sanctification, in liberation from every evil.