A Woman’s Touch: Feminist Encounters with the Hemorrhaging Woman in Mark 5.24-34
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hemorrhaging woman of Mk 5.24-34 has recently been the subject of scholarly dispute, with some feminist scholars interpreting the narrative as a critique of Jewish purity laws and others contending that purity issues are totally irrelevant. This study assesses the extent to which purity issues are essential to the narrative. Central to this investigation are two questions: (1) What is the significance of the woman’s flow of blood? (2) How does Mark’s representation of the hemorrhaging women serve his rhetorical agenda? These issues are addressed through an investigation of the pertinent biblical purity legislation, an analysis of the language in Mk 5.24-34 and an examination of Mark’s portrayal of the woman in the context of his rhetorical agenda. This inquiry suggests that it is the woman’s health that is the primary concern of the miracle story, and not her ritual impurity. The significance of her impurity cannot, however, be ignored. It remains an integral part of the narrative in so far as it is a consequence of her medical condition. But the point of the story, not least for feminist criticism, does not lie in any supposed critique or abrogation of the purity laws.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".