Ah yes, the periods book. I hinted in my 2021 reading review that I might be blogging about this book in the future. Well, here’s two posts on the book.

You may be asking “Why not just leave the book in 2021? Sure, you’re interested in the book, but found it totally dissatisfying and lacking in depth, so why not let it just be?”

Simple reason. It’s a gender thing – on so many levels.

The main level though is that I found the most spiritually insightful comment about periods in the entire book came from a bloke, Rico Tice to be specific. As a woman, I find this abhorrent. It was like I felt reading Beautifully Distinct – ultimately it gives the impression that women are stupid.

Rico Tice to the best of my knowledge (presuming he’s not had a sex change) has never had a period. Yet, the most spiritually helpful comment about periods comes from someone who has never had one!

Am I allowed to say that it makes my blood boil?

Well, I just did. Blood, yes. You get that in periods. You also get a lot of talk about blood in The Bible. In particular, there is the blood of the covenant and that is a BIG deal.

If you’ve never thought about the blood of the covenant before, then this post isn’t going to go anywhere near doing it justice. You’ll need to spend more time thinking about it by reading books on the topic. However, I had expected a book about periods to be one such book that would explore the blood of the covenant in some depth. Sadly not.

So how do we understand the blood of the covenant? What are all the functions of the blood of the covenant? Does it cleanse? Bind? Hold promises?

And does our understanding of the blood of the covenant impact in any way on our understanding of periods? If we want to understand blood from a biblical perspective we need to start by looking at the blood of the covenant – even if we conclude that it holds no bearing on the matter.

The book does contain discussions from Leviticus about cleanliness laws, but I felt it lacked a detailed discussion of the manner in which the blood of Jesus redeems us from this uncleanness.

Does not the blood of the covenant redeem our period blood and our femininity (lost at the point of the fall) and also redeem humanity completely? The blood of the covenant allows someone into the most holy place (union with God in Levitical terms) regardless of whether they’re having their period or not, in fact, regardless of whether they’re female or not.

Jones concluded that a woman’s period no longer has the same bearing on God’s redemptive purposes as it initially did, now that the Messiah has been born of a woman. If a period is no longer functioning in a redemptive manner (and it is questionable whether it ever was in the first place) then how is it functioning now? Are we missing something here or making incorrect claims?

If it’s not redemptive, then the implication is that it is unclean and/or sinful. That doesn’t sit right with me. Such a conclusion doesn’t affirm my femininity in the manner that I believe The Bible does. It also seems far too close to the view that a woman is only a baby-making machine and that now the Messiah has come and gone, there is no real function for femininity in God’s redemptive processes in our world today.

And that is such a lie.

Yours in not believing it,

Alison