ailing: drained of strength, whether a body that is unwell, a woman in her monthly bleeding, or a heart giving out under grief
This word describes a body with its strength drained away. It can be a person who is simply unwell, a city worn down until nothing is left of it, or a heart that is giving out under grief. Hebrew does not file these in separate compartments the way English does. To be described this way is to be diminished, and whether the cause is illness, bleeding, or sorrow is a matter of context rather than of a different word.
Israel's priests used it as their plain term for a woman during her monthly bleeding. In Leviticus it stands next to another word, the one for the ritual separation such a woman entered (נִדָּה), and the two do different jobs: that word names her standing in the community's ritual life, while this one names her bodily condition. The pairing is a good clue to how the priests thought about it, as something a body goes through rather than a fault in the woman.
Isaiah takes the same word and turns it into the sharpest insult he can find. Judah's silver-plated idols, once its most precious possessions, will be thrown out "like a cloth of a woman's bleeding", with a curt "Get out!" The shock works only because everyone knew the Leviticus background: the prophet moves the objects of highest devotion into the category of the most defiling thing a household could hold.
In Lamentations the word turns inward. Zion is left "desolate, ailing all the day long", and by the last chapter the whole community says the same of its own heart. The English "faint" is too weak here. In Hebrew thought the heart is where a person's vitality sits, so a heart described this way is not discouraged, it is failing. A closely related adjective used elsewhere of a heart in exactly that state (דַּוָּי) belongs to the same word family.
Nuances
Whether the word in this summarizing phrase names the woman's weakened bodily condition or the menstrual flow itself.
- majorityThe term designates the woman's reduced vitality, her state of being unwell, and the menstrual use is a specialized application of a general word for infirmity.; BDB, 188-89, s.v. דָּוֶה, דָּוָה; Baruch A. Levine, The JPS Torah Commentary: Leviticus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 96-99; Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2004), on Leviticus 15:33
- minorityThe term refers to the discharge itself, the flow of blood rather than the woman's condition.; David E. S. Stein, translator's notes to the revised JPS translation, on Leviticus 15:33 (documenting the reading of Saadiah Gaon and Rashi's second alternative)