Did Sarah Have a Seminal Emission?

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The anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews contains a justly famous panegyric to faith (see the sidebar to this article). In a series of sentences that begins “By faith,” the letter recites the accomplishments of ancient heroes—Abel, Enoch, Noah; then Abraham—and Sarah. What did Sarah accomplish by faith? The Greek contains a difficult term. Taken literally, it seems to say that by faith Sarah had a seminal emission, even though she was past the age of fertility, and as a result bore Isaac (Hebrews 11:11). The crux consists of two Greek words, katabole spermatos (katabolh; spevrmato~): “By faith Sarah received power to have a katabole spermatos, even when she was past the age.”

Katabole spermatos is the technical term for a male seminal emission. Obviously, it would seem to be incorrect to say that Sarah received power to emit semen, especially as there is no hint of this in the Old Testament passages describing the birth of Isaac in Sarah’s old age (Genesis 17:15–21, 18:9–15, 21:1–7).

Translations of Hebrews 11:11 usually evade the problem. Instead of saying that Sarah was able to emit semen, they say she was able to conceive. For example, the, Revised Standard Version translates the passage: “By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive.”¹

Other translations solve the problem by making Abraham the subject of verse 11; it was he who, in old age received the power to emit semen. In this solution the reference to Sarah is simply set off by dashes. In support of this solution, it is argued that Abraham is the subject of verses 8 through 10 and of verse 12, so he should be taken to be the subject of verse 11 as well. The reference to Sarah according to this argument, is simply a parenthetical clause: “even though Sarah was barren.” This 036solution was very recently adopted by the New Revised Standard Version:

“By faith he [Abraham] received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11:11).²

In commentaries on this epistle, a variety of other solutions are proposed: The text, it is said, in one way or another, is corrupt.

One commentator, Ceslaus Spicq, remarks that some ancient Greek authorities believed that women did emit semen.³

I think Spicq is on the right track. Moreover, it can be shown that not only the Greeks, but the Jews as well, widely believed that women had seminal emissions.

This of course was not the only view in ancient times. The traditional theory is expressed in the fifth century B.C.E.^a in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where the god Apollo says:

“This too I will tell you and mark the truth of what I say. She who is called the child’s mother is not its begetter, but only the nurse of the newly sown embryo. The begetter is the male, and she as a stranger preserves for a stranger the offspring, if no god blights its birth.”⁴

For those who held the traditional theory, however, heredity presented a special problem: The widespread and traditional notion that the father alone makes the child and provides the substance for its coming into being and development could not explain why children often resembled their mothers.

While it was known at least since the third century B.C.E. that women had ovaries,⁵ the ovum (egg) itself was not discovered until 1827 (by C. A. von Bähr)⁶. When ovaries were discovered in the Hellenistic period, they were regarded as receptacles, or containers, for the female sperm and were called testes!⁷

Pre-Socratic philosophers had already developed alternate views to the more traditional theory reflected in the quotation from Aeschylus. Censorinus, in the third century C.E. wrote:

“[The philosophers] have divergent opinions [as to] whether an embryo originates solely from the seed of the father, as Diogenes and Hippo and the Stoics have written, or also from the seed of the mother, which is the view of Anaxagoras, Alcmaeon, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Epicurus.”⁸

In short, these latter five authors (from the sixth through third centuries B.C.E.) defended the view that female semen is also needed to form an embryo. They were not the only ones, as we shall see.

Various alternate theories were proposed to account for the sex of the child or its resemblances to mother or father.

According to Alcmaeon (c. 500 B.C.E.), the sex of the child was determined by the parent “whose semen was most abundant [namely, in coition].”⁹ That is to say, if the woman’s sperm prevails in quantity, a girl will be born, and if the man’s, a boy. This principle, that the seed of either parent can be “overpowered,” occurs with various modifications in several ancient theories of sex differentiation, including those of Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus and several Hippocratic writers.

Empedocles thought that some parts of the embryo had their origins in the man’s seed, and other parts in the woman’s seed, the determining influences often being the temperature of either the uterus or the seed.

Aristotle reports that Democritus rejected this view:

“Democritus of Abdera … says, it is not because of heat and cold that one embryo becomes female and another male, but that it depends on the question which parent it is whose semen prevails—not the whole of the semen, but that which has come from the part by which male and female differ from one another.”¹⁰

Parmenides, however, held the view that the sex of the child is determined by its position in the uterus (right for males and left for females).

The great physician Galen (second century C.E.) assumed that women contributed their own sperm, but that it had a much lower value than male sperm. According to Galen, female sperm is by far less perfect, thinner and colder than male sperm. During coition, female seed is expelled from the ovaries in such a way that both seeds meet in the womb, mix and form a membrane; thereafter, the female sperm serves only as food for the male sperm in its development into an embryo.¹¹

Among Latin authors, Lucretius (first century B.C.E.) tells us:

“In the intermingling of seed it may happen that the woman by a sudden effort overmasters the power of the man and takes control of it. Then children are conceived of the maternal seed and take after their mother. Correspondingly children may be conceived of the paternal seed and take after their father.”¹²

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The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, although we don’t know who he is, was almost certainly Jewish, so it behooves us to examine whether the foregoing ideas were also prevalent in early Jewish circles.

In the Old Testament, Leviticus 12:2 seems to indicate that a woman can produce semen: “When a woman tazri>a and bears a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days.” The root of tazri>a is ZR> which means to sow (a seed). When a form of ZR> means “to become pregnant, to be impregnated,” the form tazar>a (the niphal, or passive, form) is always used (see, for example, Numbers 5:28; Nahum 1:14). In Leviticus, however, the causative (hiphil) is used. The only other place in the Hebrew Bible where the causative form of this root appears, it is used of plants in the sense of “produce seed, yield seed, form seed” (Genesis 1:11–12—on the third day of creation God created plants yielding seed). The causative form, used in Leviticus 12:2, cannot mean anything else than “make seed.” Commentators have, of course, had trouble with this verse and have proposed emendations of the text, because they found the thought expressed impossible.¹³ But we cannot avoid at least the possibility that the author of Leviticus 12 meant what he seems to have written, that is, that a woman can produce semen.

Indeed, this is exactly what some rabbis understood this biblical verse to mean.

In the Talmud^b and the midrashim,^c we meet the same variety of opinions as we saw in the Hellenistic literature. Of course there is the traditional theory that the women does not contribute anything to the formation of the embryo.¹⁴

The double-seed theory, however, is referred to in several other rabbinic passages. In the Babylonian Talmud, for example, the rabbis discuss the passage from Genesis 20 in which Abraham passes off his wife Sarah as his sister to Abimelech, king of Gerar; the Lord made Abimelech impotent and “closed fast” the wombs of the House of Abimelech. In the Hebrew, the verb “closed” appears twice, once in the infinitive and immediately thereafter, as a finite verb. For this reason, the double “closed” is translated “closed fast” or “closed up.” In the Talmud, the rabbis discuss why the word “closed” appears twice:

“Rabbi Eleazar said Why is ‘closing up’ mentioned twice? There was one closing up in the case of males—semen; and two in the case of females—semen and the giving of birth, In a baraitha^d it was taught that there were two in the case of males—semen and urinating; and three in the case of females—semen, urinating and the giving of birth. Rabina said: Three in the case of males—semen, urinating and anus; and four in the case of females—semen and the giving of birth, urinating and anus” (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 92a).

Clearly the rabbis’ discussion reflects their view that women, too, have an opening for semen.

Within the framework of the double-seed theory, the rabbis developed their own version of sex determination: If a man emits his semen first, the child will be a girl, but if the women emits her semen first, the child will be a boy.¹⁵ This theory—strange at first sight—of cross-wise sex determination was supported in the rabbinic texts by an exegesis of Leviticus 12:2 and Genesis 46:15: “These are the sons of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob in Paddan-Aram, together with his daughter Dinah.”

Because the biblical text speaks of “sons of Leah” and of “his daughter Dinah,” the rabbis took this to imply that the fact that sons were born was due to Leah and that a daughter was born was due to Jacob.

The rabbis also understood the passage from Leviticus that we previously discussed to imply, as we did, that women have a seminal emission during coition; the rabbis took the use of the causative (hiphil form of ZR> (sow) in Leviticus 12:2 to indicate that women too had a seminal emission.

With this background, we can easily understand this passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Niddah 31a):

“Rabbi Isaac citing Rabbi Ammi stated: If the woman emits her semen [hiphil of zr>, like Leviticus 12:2!] first, she bears a male child; if the man emits his semen first, she bears a female child; for it is said: ‘If a woman emits semen and bears a male child’ (Leviticus 12:2). Our Rabbis taught: At first it used to be said that ‘if the woman emits her semen first, she will bear a male child, and if the man emits his semen first, she will bear a female,’ but the Sages did not explain the reason, until Rabbi Zadok came and explained it: ‘These are the sons of Leah whom she bore unto Jacob in Paddan-Aram, with his daughter Dinah’ (Genesis 46:15), Scripture thus ascribes the males to the females and the females to the males.”^e

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In a kind of footnote to this passage, the double-seed theory is again implied:

“Our rabbis taught: There are three partners in [the conception of] man, the Holy One—blessed be He—, his father and his mother. His father supplies the semen of the white substance out of which are formed the child’s bones, sinews, nails, the brains in his head and the white in his eye. His mother supplies the semen of the red substance out of which is formed his skin, flesh, hair, blood and the blank of his eye. The Holy One—blessed be He—gives him the spirit and the breath, beauty of features, eyesight, the power of hearing, the ability to speak and to walk, understanding and discernment.”¹⁶

Here the double-seed theory is combined with the Aristotelian theory that the menstrual blood is regarded as the female contribution to the embryogenesis.

This reflection of Aristotelian theory of course suggests that the rabbis derived their ideas about the double-seed theory from the Hellenistic milieu that surrounded them. Note too that in the talmudic passage from Niddah, the rabbinic discussion is not the result of an exegesis of Leviticus 12:2 and Genesis 46:15; rather these biblical passages are adduced only in the context of a discussion of the principles of sex determination. This makes it highly probable that these biblical passages were only taken into service a posteriori as a scriptural prop to this theory. The Greek theory had probably already been adopted by the rabbis before the exegetical justification was there. The two-seed theory was not the fruit of an indigenous development of Jewish ideas about semen. Moreover, several other aspects of rabbinic embryology clearly betray the influence of Greek medical ideas.¹⁷

It seems evident that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews could easily have had knowledge of the widely current double-seed theory and was implicitly as having a seminal emission. In short, the author meant just what he said.¹⁸

It need be added only that, while I believe the evidence for this interpretation of Hebrews 11:11 has never before been so exhaustively collected, this interpretation of the passage in Hebrews was proposed as early as the Byzantine period. The Byzantine exegete Theophylactus, wrote in his Expositio in Epistulam ad Hebraeos 11:11:

“She [Sarah] received strength for a seminal emission” [Hebrews 11:11]. That is, she obtained strength to receive and retain Abraham’s seed that was emitted into her. Or, because those who have studied these matters in detail say that a woman too, in a sense, produces seed of her own, perhaps the words ‘for a seminal emission’ should be taken to mean this: ‘so that she herself too could emit semen.’”

For additional details, see Pieter Willem van der Horst, “Sarah’s Seminal Emission: Hebrews 11:11 in the Light of Ancient Embryology” in Greeks, Romans, and Christians, Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, ed. D. L. Balch, E. Ferguson and W. A. Meeks (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), pp. 287–302.

The anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews contains a justly famous panegyric to faith (see the sidebar to this article). In a series of sentences that begins “By faith,” the letter recites the accomplishments of ancient heroes—Abel, Enoch, Noah; then Abraham—and Sarah. What did Sarah accomplish by faith? The Greek contains a difficult term. Taken literally, it seems to say that by faith Sarah had a seminal emission, even though she was past the age of fertility, and as a result bore Isaac (Hebrews 11:11). The crux consists of two Greek words, katabole spermatos (katabolh; spevrmato~): “By faith Sarah received […]